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POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 



POLITICS 
AND METAPHYSICS 

BY 

FRANK PRESTON STEARNS 

THE author's club, LONDON 

Author of "The Mid-Summer of Italian Art," "The Life and 

Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne," "The Real and Ideal 

in Literature," "The Life of Tintoretto," Etc. 




BOSTON: RICHARD G. BADGER 

Toronto: The Copp Clark Co., Limited 



Copyright 1915, by Richard G Badger 
All rights reserved 






The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



JUL 2 1915 
©GI,A401604 



INSCRIBED TO 

HENRY CABOT LODGE 

A WORTHY SUCCESSOR 
TO 

Sumner and Wilson 



HEROISM 



Ruby wine is drunk by knaves. 
Sugar spends to fatten slaves. 
Rose and vine-leaf deck bufoons. 
Thunder clouds are Jove's festoons. 
Drooping oft in wreaths of dread. 
Lightning -knotted round his head. 
The hero is not fed on sweets 
Daily his own heart he eats; 
Chambers of the great are jails 
And head-winds right for royal sails. 

Emerson. 



PREFACE 

If there is a science of politics, it must be developed 
as other sciences have been, by an examination and com- 
parison of historical data with a view to the discovery of 
the causes which underlie important political phenomena, 
— and not, as is too often done, by judging of such phe- 
nomena according to purely empirical rules. It is equally 
fallacious to justify political action by its results, or to 
condemn it on a priori grounds; and it is only by the 
application of the inductive method that revolutionary 
periods, like those of Machiavelli and Napoleon, can be 
properly understood. 



CONTENTS 

Politics 

The Man of Destiny, 11 

Napoleonic Mem<:>ries. 52 

The Poetic Napoleon 68 

Napoleon's Marshals 77 

The Waterloo Campaign 87 

The Politics of "The Divina Commedia" 101 

Machiavelli's "Prince" 110 ' 

The Ides of March 143 

Goethe's Position in Practical Politics 147 

Lynch Law 158 

Dante's Political Allegory -164' ^'"V 

Metaphysics 

Mind and Brain 167 

Space and Time 169 

Pragmatism 182 



POLITICS 



POLITICS 
AND METAPHYSICS 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 

THE French Revolution raged like an awful 
conflagration, in which human beings, not 
buildings, were consumed; and when it had 
burned to ashes, there stood Napoleon, like a 
compressed little god of war, the most perfectly developed 
man of action in modern times. 

Lord Bacon says, "Augustus Csesar was endowed, if 
ever man was, with a greatness of mind, calm, serene, 
and well ordered; witness the exceeding great actions which 
he conducted in his early youth. " 

This estimate of Bacon's applies even better to Napoleon 
than to Augustus ; for the latter, though he showed remark- 
able judgment and self-command at the time of his uncle's 
death, was not the general who won the battle of Philippi. 
It was Mark Anthony who carried the popular party safely 
through that crisis, and historians have not yet given him 
sufficient credit for this. The well-known bust of the 
young Augustus, which is in the Capitoline Museum, bears 
a resemblance to Napoleon, which all observers notice; 
but at a later time his head did not develop to such full, 

11 



12 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

well-rounded capacity. If in addition to the qualities men- 
tioned by Bacon we make a list of other virtues, such as 
diligence, punctuality, determination, readiness, versa- 
tility, correct observation, mental composure, firmness, 
and courage. Napoleon is one of the few historical char- 
acters who possessed them all. Then if we add a vivid 
imagination, a rare inventive faculty, and a ready appre- 
ciation of fine and beautiful things, we may turn him about 
and look at him, on every side, without finding a flaw 
anywhere in him. He seems to be a complete man. If 
not scrupulously veracious, he had at least a veracious 
nature; the nature of a man who loves good work in him- 
self and others. 

No doubt he was ambitious, but of what sort was his 
ambition? The quality of ambition, like the quality of 
love, depends upon the individual. It may lead to the 
loftiest virtue or the most contemptible vice. Ambition 
is a plant which requires the sunshine of opportunity. 
The more rapidly we succeed, the more ambitious we 
become. In every college class there are men apparently 
as ambitious as Napoleon was at his military school. 
Some of them die of it. A cheap ambition for superiority 
did not belong to him; his was of a more sohd kind. 

To attempt to penetrate Napoleon's motives by a 
preconceived opinion of him as an exceptional man, is 
a vicious method. If we judge him at all, we must suppose 
him to be actuated by the same motives which actuate 
other men under like conditions. The early death of his 
father left him with the responsibihty of providing for 
four brothers, of whom Lucien alone possessed sufficient 
talent to make his own way in life. His family, never 
affluent, were obliged to be exceedingly economical. 
Under these circumstances a virtuous boy, as Napoleon 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 13 

certainly was, will feel that his first duty is to obtain a 
foothold in the great world, from which he can hold out a 
hand to the others. We hear that Napoleon was solemn 
and taciturn, "prematurely grave," in his youth, and 
this weight of responsibility is sufficient to account for 
the fact, without seeking an explanation deduced from 
the surprising events of his after life. It has even been 
supposed that he stunted his figure by hard study and 
exercise at the military school; but at the same time it is 
certain that he did not injure his health. From the time 
of his first military success Napoleon's personal ambition 
is so interwoven with the necessities of his time and of his 
country that it is impossible to separate one from the 
other. 

Perhaps the most remarkable trait in his character is 
revealed in the fact that his confidence does not appear 
to have been ever misplaced. He surrounded himself 
with the most honest men in France, and though he also 
made use of tricky and unprincipled persons, like Talley- 
rand and Fouche, he always knew just how far they were 
to be trusted. When during the hundred days Fouche 
was playing a double part for his own safety. Napoleon 
perceived it at once, and let him know that he understood 
his position, and for that reason was not afraid of him. 
How are we to account for this clear insight except by a 
pure love of veracity. It is only that which guides the 
historian, the philosopher, or the statesman through his 
work. Penetration is also necessary, but penetration 
is like a telescope which needs a human will behind it to 
make it of service. Voltaire had also a penetrating mind, 
but by no means a profound one. Napoleon was, after 
all, the one solid entity among the Latin races. For the 
same reason he was universally trusted. The French 



14 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

people clung to him as iron filings are attracted to a 
magnet. 

Napoleon's penetrating look has become historical, 
— ^like that of Alexander of Macedon before him. That 
it became a habit with him, so that he applied it to both 
men and women in a manner which often seemed uncivil 
is not to be denied; but in the confused condition of French 
affairs after the Revolution, having to deal continually 
with strange faces, it was the only way in which he could 
judge of his customer. 

The objection may be raised that we are describing an 
ideal man and not the real Napoleon. This is quite true, 
but without such an ideal there would never have been 
any real Napoleon as we know him. The real is the ideal 
Napoleon as conditioned by external events. It was the 
ideality in him which gave the supernal beauty to his face 
and illuminates the history that he made; for otherwise he 
would have been merely a French oflScer, as Bliicher was 
a Prussian officer, and never a genius and a world hero. 
Veracity of fact is always superior to veracity of form. 
It is not uncommon for people to have, and at the same 
time disregard, such evidence and testimony as are indis- 
pensable for sound judgment and right action. On the 
other hand, it is impossible to deal with men on a large 
scale, particularly in politics, without some faculty of 
dissimulation, — enough at least to enable us to conceal 
our thoughts; and Napoleon developed this faculty to 
such perfection that the ablest diplomats in Europe were 
not more than a match for this son of Mars, whose only 
education had been in the art of war. 

There are men and women whose inclinations follow 
so closely the lines of the universal laws that ordinarily 
they are not obliged to exercise much self-control. Napo- 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 15 

leon was one of these: he did everything he undertook 
in the very best manner, not as a matter of principle, but 
as Raphael and Titian painted their pictures. He was 
not only a great soldier, but a great artist; and this perfect 
freedom of action endowed him with extraordinary power. 
He could throw all the energy of his nature, without 
reservation, into each particular act. This separated him 
by a wide chasm from the ablest men about him, and 
caused them to look upon him almost as a supernatural 
personage. In the end, however, it exaggerated his self- 
confidence almost to the extent of a religious superstition. 
It was much to Napoleon's advantage — as it was to 
Hamilton's — that he was born on an island, and of a 
different race from the one with which he was afterwards 
identified. He had thus an opportunity in the years of 
formative intelligence of looking at France from an exter- 
nal standpoint, and could see the French people more 
exactly as they were, and are. Metternich remarked that 
none of the sovereigns of France had understood the 
French character, or had known how to deal with it so 
well as Bonaparte. Louis XIV. might say, " I am France ;" 
but Napoleon, in 1809, could have said, "France, I own 
it. " He became more and more of a Frenchman as he 
advanced in life; but was altogether more like an ancient 
Roman dropped into the nineteenth century. He was 
particularly fond as a boy of reading Plutarch's Lives; 
and it can hardly be doubted that he derived his code of 
morality from that source, although in the most atheistic 
stage of the French Revolution he remained a stanch 
Catholic and celebrated mass privately in his chamber 
when it was dangerous to do so. One of Madame Bona- 
parte's friends is reported to have spoken of her taciturn 
son as "one of Plutarch's men." 



16 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

No man can escape altogether from the influence of 
early surroundings. Modern ItaHans are well known to 
be rather tricky and Corsica has also been noted for its 
smugglers and even pirates. We sometimes trace the 
germ of this moral dereliction in Napoleon's method of 
dealing. He had not more of the lion in his composition 
than he had of the fox. He won his most decisive battles 
by tactical tricks which no one had ever thought of before; 
and his practice of carrying off valuable works of art from 
conquered cities, in order to give lustre to his administra- 
tion, reminds one of those plundering Roman generals, 
whom even the ancients could not justify. Occasionally 
we perceive an element in him as if the pure brightness 
of his intellect was momentarily shut out by a cloud. 
The larger the diamond the more liable it is to some im- 
perfection. 

It is necessary to distinguish, however, between the 
virtues of a retired life, in which there is always leisure 
to reflect upon the consequences of our conduct, and the 
life of those who act under continual pressure, and are 
obliged to decide almost instantaneously on matters of 
the highest importance. To judge Napoleon by the same 
standard as Wordsworth, or Emerson, would be an 
absurdity of logic. It would be hardly just to compare 
him with Wellington or General Sherman. 

We should always remember the element into which 
he was plunged — so young and inexperienced. France 
in the time of Henry IV. was the centre of civilization; 
but it had become a civilization rotten at the core. Its 
condition during the eighteenth century has become pro- 
verbial, but Spain, Italy, and Portugal were even more 
demorahzed. In all the Latin races vice was rampant 
and virtue persecuted; but the vigorous struggle in France 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 17 

between Huguenots and Catholics had helped to preserve 
the intellectual energy of the French race. Although 
Protestantism had been crushed out as a popular creed, 
intellectual freedom continued to survive in the skepticism 
of Voltaire and the encyclopaedists, while political indiffer- 
ence tolerated theories of government of the most revolu- 
tionary character. There were high-minded men in both 
Spain and Italy, but they lived only to suffer. They 
were isolated instances, and in neither country was there 
sufficient vitality left to enact a revolution. When religion 
becomes separated from morality — and it was just this 
condition which Martin Luther rebelled against — civiliza- 
tion has to decline and will continue to do so, until some 
great physical shock brings the world to its senses, and 
causes it to realize its true condition. 

At that time it may fairly be stated that Prussia and 
some other portions of Germany, with Sweden, Denmark, 
Hungary, Scotland, and the eastern coast of North Ameri- 
ca were the only nations in a healthy moral condition, — 
the only countries where the commandments of Moses 
were respected, and obeyed to any considerable degree. 
England was in a midway condition between Scotland 
and France. The body politic of Europe evidently re- 
quired a surgeon, and Nature, not wishing her favorite 
race to go to ruin, provided one at the right moment. 

We read of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, 
without realizing that a similar course of events has 
taken place in recent times. There is now a united 
Italy, and Spain has again obtained a constitutional 
government, but the Italy of Michel Angelo and the 
Spain of Cervantes exist no longer. Those nations have 
gone down as Rome went down before them, and their 
present influence on the course of civilization is little or 



18 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

nothing. France, Germany, and Great Britain are full 
of intellectual energy, and each has had its complement of 
great men during the present century. Italy has had 
two or three, and Spain even less. Italian soldiers fought 
bravely under Garibaldi, but were everywhere defeated 
by the Austrians in 1866, from a lack of competent com- 
manders; and the same incompetency was conspicuously 
apparent in the late contest between Spain and the United 
States. Men of superior character and nobility are to a 
nation what lighthouses are to the seacoast. 

It is a saddening investigation to trace the degradation 
of Italian art and architecture from the pure, refined 
taste of the fifteenth century, and the noble magnificence 
of the sixteenth, through various transitions of demoraliza- 
tion and reaction, until the series finally ends in the middle 
of the eighteenth century with what might be called a 
stony grin of horror. In the immediate vicinity of the 
ducal palace at Venice, there is a head carved on the base 
of a tower dedicated to St. Mary the Beautiful, which 
Ruskin thus describes: "A head, — huge, inhuman, and 
monstrous, — leering in bestial degradation, too foul to 
be either pictured or described, or to be gazed at for more 
than an instant: yet let it be endured for that instant; 
for in that head is embodied the type of the evil spirit to 
which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her 
decline. " 

Similar monstrosities are to be met with in Rome and 
other Italian cities, and the funereal monuments in the 
churches, of that period; and if not so indecent are equally 
frivolous and distasteful. What more fitting prognostic 
could there be of a great social upheaval. The concluding 
lines of Byron's tragedy of "Marino Faliero" repeat the 
same evidence, — a picture of social conditions which we 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 19 

shudder to contemplate. When Napoleon arrived before 
Venice with his army, a feeble revolution took place in his 
favor within the city; so feeble that it might be compared 
to the impotent struggles of a paralytic, but it served to 
indicate the popular impulse of the time. Napoleon made 
an end of the decrepit old republic, and almost immedi- 
ately its inhabitants doubled in number. It was like a 
surgeon lancing an ulcer. His disposing of the city after- 
wards to the Austrians as a make-weight in the negotiations 
for peace is not so creditable to him, but it is not likely 
that he would have done this if it had been avoidable. 

It has been supposed that Spanish dominion was the 
ruin of Italy; but cities like Milan and Florence that were 
under foreign government were more flourishing, and 
preserved a better morale than Venice and Rome. After 
the revolution came the virtuous, weak sentimentality of 
Canova and the Italian opera, and in France the mild, 
negative conservatism of Chateaubriand. The world had 
begun to realize its wickedness, and was making a laudable 
but not very earnest effort to behave itself again. 

Previous to Napoleon, the whole continent of Europe 
was covered with an iron network of institutions derived 
from the feudal system, which were as unsuitable to 
modern modes and customs as the armor of the Black 
Prince would have been for General Grant. The human 
race was not only spiritually miserable, but its limbs 
were fettered. 

Society in the feudal system was like an army in winter 
cantonments. Warfare, though not so deadly nor carried 
on so extensively as at present, was almost perpetual, so 
that subordination and military discipline prevailed every- 
where. Now, an officer in an army can strike a soldier, 
and, if he does it without sufficient cause, the latter has a 



20 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

chance of redress by applying to his superior officer; but 
if a private soldier strikes an officer, the latter has a right 
to shoot him. This is necessary for military subordina- 
tion; but apply it to civil affairs and what a condition of 
things you will have. Voltaire was beaten by a French 
lord as any slave might have been; but when he attempted 
to obtain redress he was imprisoned for several months 
to cure his insolence. Even in England a hundred years 
ago there was no law which could compel a nobleman to 
pay debts contracted to merchants or professional men. 
The revolutions of the seventeenth century had mitigated 
the evil largely in Great Britain; as did the law reforms of 
Frederick in Prussia, and the reforms of Joseph II. in 
Austria. It was accordingly these three nations which 
formed the barrier against the extension of French influence 
under Napoleon. 

Heroes do not always appear when they are needed, 
nor do they fit exactly the places which are assigned to 
them. There are periods in history in which human 
affairs seem to be given over to the sport of circumstances, 
and a blind, deaf fate mocks all efforts to discover a 
rational sequence of events. There are other periods 
which seem to be in the care of a supernatural guidance; 
when events take place as if according to a prearranged 
plan, and great men appear unexpectedly to play their 
parts in them, as actors come out from behind the scenery 
of a theatre. Of the former sort, the Italian leagues of 
the fifteenth century and the thirty years' war in Grer- 
many are conspicuous examples: of the latter are the 
struggle of the American colonies for independence, and 
the consulate and empire in France. Napoleon's mission 
in life was to knock the feudal system in the head. 

Julius Csesar is the only famous man with whom we 
can compare him. They are the two greatest soldiers in 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 21 

history, and at the same time great lawgivers, writers, 
and revolutionists. Wendell Phillips said, " Caesar crossed 
the Rubicon borne in the arms of a people trodden into 
the dust by a cruel and rapacious oligarchy;" and the 
world is generally coming to that opinion. It was exactly 
the same spirit which animated the soldiers of Napoleon 
in his two Italian campaigns; but the difference was that 
in his case the oligarchy was without France instead of 
within it. All the kings of Europe were banded together 
in support of hereditary privilege, and this "little cor- 
poral" stood forth as the champion of character and 
virtue. It was Thor again fighting the giants. 

Carlyle calls him "the champion of democracy," but 
that is not likely. As an army officer he would naturally 
have more confidence in subordination as a political 
principle than in equal rights. He was, however, the 
champion of justice, and of equality for all classes before 
the law. Wherever he went with his battalions he ap- 
peared as a political reformer, — a reorganizer in the inter- 
est of public morality; and this accounts partly for the 
marvelous success of his early campaigns. The rank and 
file of the enemy looked upon him as a liberator, and 
actually wished for his success. The French fought for a 
cause, but the Austrians fought because they had no 
alternative. Napoleon was a hero in Vienna itself, and 
Beethoven had already dedicated a symphony to him 
when the news came that he had crowned himself at Fon- 
tainebleau. If Napoleon had died before that event, 
would he not have been considered one of the noblest 
heroes of all time? 

A government that will endure the storms of history 
must be rooted like the oak. It must have its beginning 
far back in the records of the nation, and be endeared to 
the hearts of the people. It must grow underground, as 



22 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

it were, before it comes to the surface. The federal Con- 
stitution of the United States was a natural outcome from 
the colonial governments which preceded it; and these 
were derived, with some simple modifications, from the 
municipal and constitutional governments of England. 
Such was not the case with the French Directory. It had 
no historical basis, but was merely a temporary structure 
raised upon the ruins of the old French monarchy. The 
people of France were not accustomed to it. It was not 
suited to their character and they distrusted it. It was 
vicious and ineffective. Our foreign ambassadors soon 
discovered what unprincipled men were elected to the 
Directory. " Mirabeau, " said Napoleon, "was a rascal, 
but a very smart one. There were as great rascals as he 
on the Directory with me, but they were not half so smart." 
The mercantile class distrusted the Directory from a lack 
of faith in its continued existence: the poorer classes dis- 
trusted it on account of its impersonal character. A fre- 
quent change of rulers has its advantages, but it greatly 
lessens executive responsibility. A reaction against the 
Directory was inevitable, and it would have taken place 
much sooner but for the bad diplomacy of Pitt and the 
Austrian minister, Thugut. The wars that resulted from 
this diplomacy in fact prevented just what the Austrian 
and English governments wished to accomplish. But for 
the brilliant campaigns of Moreau and Napoleon it is 
highly probable that the Bourbon family would have been 
reseated on the throne of France before the close of the 
century. The course of history sometimes depends on a 
single will. 

About the year 1800 two counter-revolutions took place, 
of opposite tendencies; one in France and the other in the 
United States. Let us suppose that Napoleon was ambi- 
tious to become dictator. The fact makes little diflference. 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 23 

It was inevitable that he should become dictator whether 
he wished it or not. The Romans were the most practical 
people of antiquity, and none more jealous of absolute 
power; and they knew well enough what they were doing 
when in times of public danger they vested the supreme 
authority in a single person. On Napoleon's return from 
Egypt he found the government of his country equally 
bankrupt in money and reputation; commerce was ruined; 
and the armies of the republic defeated and demoralized. 
There was hardly more than one opinion: that he was the 
only man who could save the state in this emergency. 
The result justified the measure: for no sooner had Na- 
poleon been placed at the head of affairs than his electric 
energy penetrated to the most distant provinces and 
into every department of public activity. With incredible 
quickness the treasury was filled, trade revived, fresh 
armies equipped, and the right man was everywhere found 
in his proper place. 

After the victories of Marengo and Hohenlinden, Na- 
poleon was confronted by even greater difficulties. There 
was a political organization in France, but otherwise the 
social fabric was everywhere disordered. The early re- 
formers of the Revolution, especially the Girondists, 
might be compared to the alchemist in Hawthorne's 
fable who killed his wife in attempting to remove her 
birthmark. They desired to abolish a debased govern- 
ment, a superannuated religion, intolerable class distinc- 
tions, and social disabilities; and for the time being they 
quite destroyed government, religion, and good society. 
Alison, a historian more just to Napoleon than some later 
ones, says of France in 1801, "Not only had the throne 
been overturned, the nobility exiled, and the landed 
estates confiscated; but the institutions of religion, law, 
commerce, and education were almost annihilated. Even 



24 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

the establishments of charity had shared in the general 
wreck; the monastery no longer dispensed its munificence 
to the poor, and the doors of the hospitals were closed 
against the indigent sick and wounded." Napoleon per- 
ceived that before he could govern France he must obtain 
the co-operation of church and school. 

There is nothing that a statesman dreads like interfering 
in questions of religion; and many who have done so have 
lost their lives in consequence. Napoleon, however, re- 
stored Catholicism, which was the only practical course 
to pursue, at a single stroke. The skepticism of Voltaire 
had culminated in the nihilism of Paine and the atheism 
of Robespierre, and a strong reaction had set in. If 
Napoleon had attempted to introduce Protestantism as a 
national faith, the French people would have become 
divided into hostile camps, and would have fallen an easy 
prey to their enemies. As it happened, there was strong 
opposition in high places to Napoleon's course. Moreau, 
who was the Pompey of his time, set himseK against it, 
and ungraciously refused to attend the first mass which 
was celebrated by the new government in Notre Dame. 
He may have been more enlightened than Napoleon, but 
he was not so wise — not so patriotic. The true patriot 
knows by a sense of tact and instinct what is best to be 
done in such cases. 

Napoleon next restored the time-honored names of the 
months and days of the week, for which revolutionary 
epithets had been substituted. This he accomplished by 
a single edict, and thereby won much credit for himself 
from all parts of the world. He next recalled a hundred 
and fifty thousand exiles who had been hving in England 
and Germany since 1793, many of them in great destitu- 
tion. He could not restore their confiscated estates to 
them, though it cannot be doubted that they deserved a 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 25 

partial indemnity; but he conciliated them as much as 
possible in other ways. He restored good society by 
recognizing those informal but sensible distinctions of 
classes such as we respect in America; and, if his state 
receptions were not so brilliant as those of Louis XIV., 
they had at least a superior moral tone. Napoleon's 
own conversation was delightful; the plain sense and 
simple grandeur of his ideas captivated everybody; though 
his methods of preserving decorum in the drawing-room, 
and in his own household, were sometimes too much like 
those of the camp. When his face grew dark, everybody 
shivered, not knowing where the lightning would strike; 
but his reprimands were always well deserved, and on the 
whole salutary. It was his way of keeping order. His 
brothers enjoyed a larger share of this than others, yet 
they do not appear to have been much afraid of him. 

We cannot but admire the clearness of judgment, 
resolution, and decision, by which he effected these radical 
changes. During the First Consulate, the French govern- 
ment securities nearly trebled in value; and the only 
question asked was, "How could this prosperity be main- 
tained and made continuous. " Napoleon was only thirty- 
two, and his fame was like that of Alexander. It is stated 
that when Beethoven heard that Napoleon had obtained 
for himself the office of life-consul, with power of nominat- 
ing a successor, he cast the score of his heroic symphony 
on the floor and allowed it to remain there for some days. 
Napoleon's usurpation, as it has been called by his enemies, 
has always been considered by republicans a severe blow 
to liberal institutions; but if we compare it with Cromwell's 
treatment of the British Parliament, we find similar under- 
lying causes in both instances. There was the same 
division of opinion and uncertainty in the councils of the 
republican leaders in France as that which embarrassed 



26 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

Cromwell so much in managing the affairs of the Puritan 
party. In both cases there was a strong military pressure 
behind the usurper; and a strong external need of concen- 
tration. Subsequent events proved that Cromwell's life 
could only be safe by pursuing the course he adopted, and 
we may suspect as much in regard to Napoleon. The 
repetition of such events in history would seem to indicate 
that they were unavoidable. No man could have suc- 
ceeded in elevating himself to Napoleon's position through 
personal ambition alone. As in Caesar's case, it was 
necessary to have a strong political party behind him; 
and to this end it was essential that he should assimilate 
himself to the aims and purposes of his party. Not only 
the French army wished for the life-consulship, but a large 
majority of the French people wished it, — as was proved 
by the vote that was taken in ratification of the change of 
government. Napoleon must have been gratified by this 
expression of public confidence, but, like every great con- 
structor, he naturally desired to see the work he had be- 
gun carried to its completion; and this was even of more 
importance to him than honor. 

If at the close of two years Napoleon had resigned the 
consulship, which was really a dictatorship,* and the Direc- 
tory had again come into power, what would have been 
the consequences? What condition would France have 
been in to withstand the next coaUtion of England, 
Austria, and Russia? Every aristocrat in Europe was 
determined to crush out the dangerous French innovation. 
It is not likely that Napoleon would have found a place 
in the Directory. He had proved his superiority to all of 
the Frenchmen in public life; such superiority as is more 
dangerous to the possessor than to others. He might 

*I have since found that Napoleon gave the same explanation to 
Count Las Cases. 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 27 

have been exiled or even put to death. If the sole con- 
sulship survived, Moreau would probably have been 
elected in Napoleon's place. In 1800 Napoleon placed 
Moreau in command of the best army that France 
possessed, and went to the Marengo campaign with 
a greatly inferior force. Is it likely that Moreau, who 
was afterward implicated in the conspiracy of Cadoadal, 
would have treated Napoleon with equal magnanimity? 
It is more probable that Moreau would have stood in the 
way of Napoleon's employment in any position where he 
might have a chance to distinguish himself. The best 
evidence of this is, that he afterwards fought against his 
own country, in the army of the Tsar of Russia, which 
can only be accounted for on the ground of a deep-seated 
animosity toward Napoleon.* 

Perhaps the best excuse for Napoleon's course at that 
time was the codification of French law in the interest of 
equality and universal justice. He felt especial interest 
in this work, which has survived his battles, and embodied 
the best fruits of the French Revolution. The codifica- 
tion was almost too hastily accomplished, — for it was a 
work of years, — and could only have been performed 
under the supervision of a single mind. After the Code 
Napoleon had been adopted, it was still necessary that 
it should be sustained in practice until the legal profession 
should become accustomed to it. Otherwise, a sudden 
revolution of the most fickle people in Europe might 
have overturned the whole structure of revolutionary 
jurisprudence and left it sticking in the mire of reform. 
The change from life-consul to emperor was little more 
than a nominal one. Napoleon's power remained the 

*Napoleon twice treated Moreau with exceptional magnanimity; and 
Moreau was killed at Dresden in consequence of an order given by Na- 
poleon himself. 



28 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

same, but it was surrounded by more formality and court 
etiquette. He was virtually emperor already, and it was 
better on many accounts that he should be recognized by 
the proper title. He was not a man to care for names but 
for realities. Before he returned from Egypt he wrote to 
his brother, "At twenty-nine, I am already tired of glory. " 
It is certain that the etiquette of court life was distasteful to 
him. He repeated this several times, adding that elaborate 
ceremonies were not becoming to a soldier. 

The enlightened government of the future should be a 
rational republicanism; a republicanism foimded not so 
much on the rights of the individual as on duties to the 
state ; and it would have been well if Napoleon could have 
resigned his dictatorship, and assisted with his wise head 
in framing a constitutional government which would have 
united the best qualities of the Roman, the English, and 
the American. Such an effort of his genius would be 
more pleasant to contemplate than the long list of his 
battles now carved on the Arc de Triomphe. This, how- 
ever, was not to be; educated in the army instead of in the 
law, his inclination undoubtedly favored a more military 
form of government. If such a plan crossed his mind, we 
may suppose that he dismissed it. There is always a 
tendency to imperialism in democracy, and of this he was 
ready enough to take advantage. It is only in the high 
tides, or rather in the smooth waters of civilization, that 
republican governments have proved to be possible; usual- 
ly in communities favored by their geographical position. 
Whether such could have succeeded in France at the 
beginning of the nineteenth century is problematic and 
could only be proved by experiment. We can thank our 
isolated position in America for what was accomplished 
here in 1787; accomphshed by the mighty exertions of men 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 29 

trained and educated in English constitutional history. 
It is safe to conclude that a slight external pressure at 
that time would have prevented the adoption of our con- 
stitution; and, indeed, such adoption was seriously threat- 
ened by consideration of the slaveholder's interest. There 
were in Napoleon's day not less than five political parties 
in France, and of these the one which corresponded most 
nearly to our Federalists counted the smallest number of 
votes. To the confusion of the revolutionary period there 
had s\icceeded a confusion of opinions. In the public 
mind there is always uncertainty and indecision; and the 
general public naturally turned for help to the man who 
had a mind of his own, and was never found vacillating. 
The problem of the hour was whether or no poor human 
nature was to be crushed again beneath the juggernaut of 
aristocratic privilege. Napoleon foresaw that this was 
to be fought out in a long and bloody conflict, and he pre- 
pared himseK for the coming struggle. 

According to the Peace of Amiens, which followed the 
French victories of Marengo and Hohenlinden, Napoleon 
was to withdraw his forces from Switzerland and Italy; 
and the British government on its part promised to restore 
Cape Colony in Africa to Holland and the island of Malta 
to the Knights of St. John, from whom it had been treach- 
erously pirated. Malta, however, was an important 
strategic position for the British cruisers, and possession 
of the Cape of Good Hope secured the maritime highway 
to India; so that public opinion in England was strongly 
averse to having the conditions of the treaty carried into 
effect; although Fox and the Liberals were anxious for 
peace, and considered that the pledges of the treaty ought 
to be kept. Having waited a reasonable time, therefore, 
and finding that the British cabinet had no intention of 



30 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

acting in good faith with him, Napoleon marched his 
troops back into Switzerland and Piedmont and took 
possession again. This action was made an excuse at 
Westminster for the renewal of hostilities; and it was at 
this time that Napoleon used that celebrated phrase to 
the English ambassador, "France may be destroyed, but 
she cannot be intimidated." The true cause of the war 
lay much deeper. Ever since the time of the Tudors it 
had been a tradition of English foreign politics that the 
possession of the Low Countries by a strong power would 
be dangerous to English independence. Napoleon also 
recognized this when he said, " Antwerp is a sword pointed 
at the throat of England;" that is, at the mouth of the 
Thames. It is true that Napoleon was in no wise 
responsible for the annexation of Belgium or the French 
protectorate in Holland, but he would have considered it 
cowardly, as the great mass of the French people would, 
to have surrendered those conquests. It would have been 
considered a base desertion of the Dutch and Belgian 
democrats. The same was true of northern Italy. Even 
if Napoleon had been willing to return to the ancient 
boundaries of France for the sake of peace and the balance 
of power, it is not likely that this would have availed much. 
In the temper of the French people at that time, excited 
as they were with a rose-colored enthusiasm of reforming 
the whole world, it could only have resulted in Napoleon's 
overthrow, and transferring the reins of government to 
less capable or less practical hands. Even Napoleon's 
life would not have been safe imder such conditions. He 
had to go on in the course which destiny had prescribed 
for him, and was actually safer on the battlefield than he 
would have been in Paris, if he had pursued the policy 
which so many historians have since prescribed as the 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 31 

proper course for him. He recognized this himself, and 
frequently alluded to it; but few of those about him, and 
still fewer afterwards were able to comprehend what he 
meant. He was like a man between two fires, and this 
situation explains the apparent recklessness with which 
he often acted.* 

In the coming struggle the French people were not only 
obliged to contend against the fossilized principles of 
mediaeval Europe, but against the living and highly active 
principle of the balance of power, and the still more im- 
portant principle of national independence. Did Napoleon 
realize the task that was before him? Did he realize that 
his enemies could not conclude a lasting peace so long as 
Holland and western Germany were practically united to 
France? No word ever escaped him from which we can 
infer that he understood this supreme law of modern 
international politics. Great actors in the world's drama 
do not look too far ahead or consider too curiously. The 
practical statesman turns from one object to another, 
seizing always the one that is most prominent and im- 
portant. Great events in those times pressed upon one 
another so rapidly that men acted as it were from instinct, 
and had hardly time to exercise forethought. The German 
view of Napoleon is that he was an instrument in the 
hands of fate, and like Michel Angelo (whose Christ in 
the Last Judgment resembles him) built better "than he 
knew." Napoleon's motives may not have been philan- 
thropic; he may have desired the extension of French 
interests more than the cause of equal rights, and his per- 
sonal or family interests may have often obscured higher 
objects in his mind. All we can say is that he pursued a 



*Yet the French are the yeast of Europe and their heroic actions rival 
those of the Greeks and Romans. 



32 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

well-defined course in a consistent manner, and should 
receive credit for doing so.* 

When a military genius is bom on a throne, or like 
Cromwell obtains possession of one, the rest of the world 
may well look out for itseK. If Napoleon had been ham- 
pered by an Aulic council like that at Vienna, or had been 
tied to a modem English ministry by submarine cables, 
he might not have accomplished so very much. It was 
certainly fortunate for the fame of Nelson and Wellington 
that they were able to act in as independent a manner as 
Napoleon himself. He often profited by the mistakes of 
his adversaries, but it was more frequently the simple 
grandeur of his ideas that defeated them. He calculated 
his plans so exactly and carried them out to such minute 
perfection that if it had not been for the disasters of his 
Russian expedition, it is difficult to see how he could ever 
have been overcome; but it might have happened in some 
other manner, a stray bullet, or perhaps a fall from his 
horse. The man who ruined him was the unknown person 
who planned the burning of Moscow. That was a catas- 
trophe which he had never thought of, and from that 
hour his fall was certain. 

His military movements have been criticised of late 
even by his admirers; but too much, I think, according 
to the methods of our own time. Napoleon does not 
appear to me like a gambler in war, as M. Thiers and Mr. 
Ropes are pleased to call him. Those who have suggested 



*This and the foregoing statements concerning Napoleon's interference 
in German affairs are fully supported by the best German historians. 
Menzel's is, I believe, the only one yet translated into English, and it is 
not first-rate, but his evidence is the more valuable because he belongs 
to that class of German writers who have strong anti-Gallic sentiments. 
He fumes over the French occupation of western Germany, but he admits 
that Napoleon's government was just, and his reforms highly beneficial. 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 33 

that in the campaign of 1805 he hazarded his communica- 
tions to an attack in the rear from the Prussians, are not 
so well informed as Napoleon was as to the condition of 
the Prussian army. A year later Napoleon writes to his 
brother, "The preparations that Prussia is making for 
war are ridiculous." In 1805 Prussia was in no condition 
to interfere with Napoleon. 

It is true that he would have been defeated at Marengo 
but for the fortunate arrival of Desaix, and Kellermann's 
brilliant charge; but it was Napoleon who secreted Keller- 
mann in the vineyard, and he evidently detached Desaix 
to march on a parallel road so that he might fall on the 
enemy's flank as soon as he heard the sound of the cannon. 
It was an agreement like that between Blucher and Wel- 
lington at Waterloo, and equally successful. He took 
too large risks, perhaps, in his last German campaign, but 
the result could hardly have been other than it was, and 
the habit of playing a bold game had become fixed upon 
him. During his captivity Napoleon often talked the 
matter over with his_ companions, but never could see 
how the campaign might have ended successfully. 

Whatever special talent his adversaries possessed, that 
Napoleon had also. He was in himself equal to all the 
other generals in Europe. Wellington may have matched 
him in handling troops on the battlefield; but Wellington 
added nothing to the art of war, and as a strategist was 
not even equal to Marmont. He had rare foresight and 



In regard to the war of 1809, he flatly contradicts the statements of 
English historians who allege that it was forced by Napoleon. He states 
that it originated in an attempt by the Austrian government to excite an 
uprising against Napoleon in central Germany, but this only resulted in 
a few isolated outbreaks. He considers Napoleon the greatest hero of 
modern times. See the American edition, pp. 1459, 1471, 1472, 1482, 
1492, 1511, 1515. 



34 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

made a brave defense in Portugal; but he was afraid to 
face Massena in the open field, and accomplished little in 
Spain until Napoleon had withdrawn all the forces that 
could be spared from the peninsula. Bliicher was as bold 
and swift as Wellington was slow and cautious; but in 
other respects the two were much alike. He defeated 
Napoleon at Laon in 1814, — it is true with a superior 
army, — and he saved the battle of Leipsic for the allies, 
as he did afterward at Waterloo. 

Next to Napoleon, the model soldier of the time was 
the Archduke Charles of Austria. His campaign of 1809 
was on both sides the most brilliant and bravely fought 
of the present century. The series of actions from Eck- 
muhl to Ratisbon, extending over a space of ten miles, 
was such as only two commanders could perform who 
perfectly understood each other. The Archduke, though 
defeated, is admitted to have displayed great military 
skill; and in the battle of Essling, which followed soon 
after, he had much the best of the game, although the 
sudden rising of the Danube prevented reinforcements 
from reaching the French army. Wagram was one of 
the most equal conflicts ever fought. There were ninety 
thousand men on either side, and the level plain of the 
Mayfield gave no advantage of position to one party or 
the other. Napoleon was victorious by means of an 
invention which had never before been thought of, and 
which I believe has not been used since. He advanced 
his cannon against the enemy's centre almost like a charge 
of cavalry, — a movement which could only have succeeded 
on perfectly level ground. 

It is a mistake to suppose that Napoleon was lavish of 
the lives of his soldiers. On the contrary, he was as 
careful of them as possible. He overran both Austria 
and Prussia with a loss of something like ten thousand 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 35 

men. The desperate struggles of 1809, 1813, and 1815 
caused a frightful loss of life to both sides; but there was 
no help for it, and strange as it may seem, nobody was to 
blame for this. 

The Italian nationalists who supported Victor Emman- 
uel and Garibaldi have admitted that Italy was never so 
well governed before as under Napoleon's viceroy; though 
particular cities like Florence and Venice had been better 
governed. The numerous uprisings in Spain and Italy 
during the Restoration between 1820 and 1848 all had 
for their object constitutional government and a return 
to the Code Napoleon. The enlightened princes of south- 
western Germany, as well as the Duke of Weimar, adopted 
the same platform of their own accord. The same in- 
fluences prevailed even in Portugal after many turns of 
fortune and an obstinate struggle with the nobles and 
clergy. Napoleon's conquests were so beneficial that 
they were even of advantage to countries which he treated 
most severely. There is no evidence that he wished to 
make war against Prussia. It was not for his interest to 
do so. He could fight England, Austria, and Russia 
together, but he foresaw if Prussia were added to these 
three powers the struggle might be too much for him. 

The Prussians, however, were in a vainglorious state 
of mind, such as the French were in 1870. The passage 
of Napoleon's army across an outlying piece of their 
territory was not a sufficient offense of which to make a 
casus belli. The truth appears to have been that they 
were jealous of French victories and wished for a trial of 
skill with the great conqueror. Napoleon certainly treated 
Prussia with great severity, but the chastisement was not 
without favorable results. It enabled Chancellor Stein 
to enact the liberation of the serfs, and to settle the land 
question in a manner greatly to the advantage of the 



36 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

common people. It is supposed that Frederick the Great 
wished also to make these changes, but was deterred from 
doing so on account of the opposition of his army officers, 
who mostly belonged to the nobility. The present vigor- 
ous and healthy condition of Prussia is owing in no small 
measure to the catastrophe of Jena.* 

Napoleon was also the liberator of Poland, and, in 
spite of his severe military exactions, his all too brief 
dominion there was looked upon as an oasis in the long 
dreary desert of Russian absolutism. His government 
was not despotic, for everything was done according to 
law, and the capable Poles who took service under him 
found their merits appreciated as quickly as if they had 
been born Frenchmen. The burning of Moscow was a 
greater misfortime to Poland than the burning of Warsaw 
would have been. 

It appears to have been during the Prussian campaign 
of 1806 that Napoleon first conceived the idea of obtaining 
peace by universal dominion. This, however, would 
have been a positive misfortune to mankind, and it brought 
him into conflict with two political principles, which he 
could bend with his superhuman strength, but could not 
break; so that they finally recoiled against him and cast 
him from his throne. These were nationality, and the 
balance of power. 

To quote Hegel again, — and no one is better worth 
quoting, — "It was against the rock of German nationality 
that Napoleon shattered himself. " He might have added 
also English and Spanish nationality. It has become a 
fixed idea in the minds of a majority of men that a people 
speaking the same language, of a common origin, and 
common customs, have a right to a government of their 



*See Professor Seeley's biography of Von Stein. 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 37 

own. It is a principle which has been centuries in develop- 
ing, but has acquired great power. The heart of humanity 
is in sympathy with it. Consider what it has accom- 
plished since 1820. Belgium has become independent, 
and so have Servia and Bulgaria. Schleswig and Holstein 
have been united with Germany, and Germany has become 
united in itself. The Hungarians have obtained all the 
independence they require, and Italy has become inde- 
pendent and united. It was more this feeling that caused 
the independence of the American colonies than any 
decided misgovernment on the part of England. The 
only exception to it has been the separation from France 
of Alsace and Lorraine, whose inhabitants were originally 
German, but had become Gallic through a long period of 
French government. 

There were two causes which may have prevented Napo- 
leon from recognizing the right of nationality. In the 
first place, he was without a country of his own. He 
had adopted France and become identified with it; but 
his father emigrated to Corsica at a time when there was 
a bitter feeling on the island against the French, and 
Corsica was not enough of itself to make a fatherland. 
In the second place, from his early youth until middle 
life the classes in all adjacent nations were so divided 
against one another as for the time being almost to sup- 
press the feeling for nationality. As these disputes, how- 
ever, became finally adjusted, the love of one's own country 
rose superior to the admiration for French liberalism, and 
introduced into the affairs of Europe a new element on 
which the great magician had not sufficiently counted. 

Napoleon's enemies have always enumerated among 
his imaginary crimes the removal of the king of Spain in 
favor of his brother Joseph. Now, in reality to put an 
end to such an effeminate, mendacious, and altogether 



38 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

disgraceful race as the line of Spanish sovereigns, from 
Philip II. downward, was an act of beneficent manliness, 
for which not only Spain, but all other nations ought to 
have been thankful. Professor Seeley says : " The adminis- 
tration of Spain had long been in the contemptible hands 
of Manuel Godoy, supposed to be the queen's lover, yet 
at the same time high in the favor of King Charles IV. 
Ferdinand, the heir apparent, headed an opposition; but 
in character he was not better than the trio he opposed, 
and he had lately been put under arrest on suspicion of 
designs upon his father's life." A precious family this, 
truly, and one better suited to a house of correction than a 
palace. The overthrow of Nero was not more perfectly 
deserved, but Napoleon's peremptory method offended the 
national pride of the Spanish people. They felt that 
their rights as an independent state had been trampled 
on; and the classes that would have been chiefly benefited 
by the change were the foremost to revolt and showed 
the most bitter opposition to it. Insurrections broke out 
all over the country, and this lack of savoir faire gave 
Napoleon more trouble and cost him more lives than ten 
years of warfare with England. 

The explanation of his severe treatment of Prussia is 
simple enough. He said he* had "no ill-will against 
Prussia; but if he could not remain at peace with her it 
was necessary to crush her." He reduced the Prussian 
army to twenty thousand men, ruined the commerce of 
the country, and joined its eastern provinces to the king- 
dom of Westphalia. He had not counted, however, on 
Prussian nationality. In 1813 the people rose to a man, 
and the nobles pawned their jewels for a war contribution. 
They fought with the same desperation as the French did 
in '95, and with even more stubbornness. Wherever 
Napoleon was not present in person his troops were 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 39 

defeated, and for the first time he discovered the differ- 
ence between a heterogeneous empire and a substantial 
nationahty. 

No less important a principle is the balance of power. 
Without this no country would feel safe from the attacks 
of its neighbors. It is difficult enough to keep the peace 
at any time between two or more rival nations, each with 
its national prejudices, jealousies, and material interest; 
but without the balance of power peace would be almost 
impossible. Witness the hundred years of warfare between 
England and France in the time of the Plantagenet kings. 
Such purposeless, indiscriminate fighting would not be 
permitted at the present day. The chief distinction be- 
tween the politics of modern Europe and those of the 
Grseco-Roman world consists in this principle. Universal 
domination means political stagnation, the decline of 
civilization, and barbarian conquest. The supremacy 
of France in Europe, even of a French republic, or the 
supremacy of any single nation, would be an international 
misfortune. Among a family of nations, though there 
may be contention and ill feeling, there is also that inde- 
pendence of character and interchange of ideas which give 
moral good health. We need the Englishman for his 
manliness, the German for his sincerity and depth of 
feeling, and the Frenchman for his social virtues. It has 
been the very capstone of Bismarck's diplomacy that, 
after having seriously disturbed the balance of power in 
Europe, he was able to reconstruct it again on a firmer and 
more rational basis than before. 

It is far from pleasant to have to take sides against 
such a magnificent man as Napoleon; but in the end we 
are obliged to do this. He carried matters to such an 
extreme that the minds of all men were in a state of tension, 
so that they felt they could endure it no longer. Like 



40 POLITICS A^D METAPHYSICS 

many another statesman, he was right in the beginning, 
but wrong at the close of his career. Even his partisans 
in France felt this. It seemed as if the iron network of 
feudalism, which Napoleon had shattered, had been forged 
again into a massive chain, which was twisted about the 
whole of Europe, and was crushing out all freedom of 
action and cheerful human activity. Carlyle, then a 
student at Edinburgh, felt it with his keen, artistic sensi- 
bility, and described in his old age how people woke up at 
the fall of Napoleon as if from a hideous nightmare. Na- 
poleon never perceived it himself; he had become too 
much of a partisan; and perhaps could hardly distinguish 
his own interests from those of his country. With all his 
breadth of mind and clear penetration, he never could 
place himself in the position of his adversaries. I do not 
suppose any man could do it. He continued to the end 
fighting the Russians and Prussians and Austrians in his 
own mind. 

The Russian campaign of 1812 was Napoleon's first 
aggressive movement — if we except his occupation of Spain 
— and the only one for which he can fairly be blamed. 
Dr. Ropes brings forward evidence to prove that the Tsar 
Alexander was meditating war and acting in a manner 
hostile to his agreement with Napoleon, but it does not 
seem likely that Alexander would have gone to war of his 
own accord until he could have obtained the support of 
Austria and perhaps of Prussia also.* Napoleon's ostensi- 
ble complaint was that the Russian government permitted 
the importation of English merchandise contrary to Na- 
poleon's embargo. This is probable enough, but it was 
much for Napoleon's interest that it should have been 

*Menzel states, however, that the Russian campaign was caused by 
Alexander's demand for the duchy of Warsaw, and his accumulation of 
heavy forces on the PoUsh frontier. 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 41 

permitted. Although there had not been since 1805 any- 
direct commercial relations between England and France, 
an immense smuggling traffic had been carried on by way 
of Belgium, because Frenchmen wanted their coffee and 
other tropical products, and Englishmen were equally 
anxious for a supply of silks and brandy. The traffic that 
was carried on through Russia between 1810 and 1812 was 
of a similar character and served to content people on the 
continent of Europe with the existing political order. 
Green and other English historians have vainly imagined 
that Napoleon's object was to humiliate their country; 
but Napoleon's mind was too practical and his nature too 
magnanimous for such idle folly. Metternich spoke of it 
as the va hanque of a gambler whose head has been turned 
by unlimited successes. At the same time, when consulted 
by the Emperor Francis in regard to the probable issue of 
the campaign, he expressed no doubt that Napoleon would 
accomplish his object whatever that might be; and it is 
well that those who look upon it now as a foolhardy 
enterprise should remember this. I do not know that 
Napoleon at any time gave an explanation of his reasons 
for it, but we may gather them from casual observations 
made at St. Helena. He told Dr. O'Meara, in a discourse 
on Poniatowski, that he intended to have made him king 
of Poland. This casts light on the subject at once. If 
Poland could be reorganized under French protection, 
perhaps with boundaries more extended than ever before, 
and with the Code Napoleon and a land reform to satisfy 
the cravings of the Polish people, it would form a strong- 
hold in the east of Europe, on which the French emperor 
could always rely for diplomatic support in peace and 
military assistance in war. It would be a breakwater 
against Russian aggression, and a military post in the rear 
of Austria and Prussia. Such a government would prob- 



42 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

ably have satisfied the aspirations of the Poles for inde- 
pendence, and would have been a very great advantage to 
them. This evidently was Napoleon's plan, and if he had 
succeeded in realizing it, it is difficult to imagine how his 
enemies could ever have gotten the better of him.* 

That Napoleon did not anticipate the burning of Moscow 
is certain. He confessed that he never thought of it; and 
it was perhaps the only large city in Europe that could 
have been destroyed in that manner. It was composed 
chiefly of wooden houses, and the weather of northern 
Russia is subject to severe northwest winds which blow 
from three to four days at a time. Such a conflagration 
could not have happened in Paris or London. The fire 
engines were of a primitive description, and had all been 
cut so that even Napoleon's army was unable to stop the 
conflagration. He described it as the grandest and most 
terri|ble sight that he had ever witnessed. 

The burning of Moscow was the last desperate resort 
of the Russian government to drive Napoleon from the 
country. In this it succeeded, but in the natural order of 
events it would not have caused serious injury to the 
French army, nor would it have prevented Napoleon from 
opening a vigorous campaign on the Polish frontier the 
following spring; and considering the immense destruction 
of property, it was doubtful if the Russian cause would 
on the whole have been improved by it. It was the pre- 
mature and unprecedented cold during the French retreat 
which so nearly destroyed the grande armee. The French 
soldiers left their ranks, and wandered into farmhouses, 
where they were easily captured by the Russians. "In 
one night, " says Napoleon, " I lost forty thousand horses. " 



*Menzel gives important evidence on this score, but his own reflec- 
tions are neither judicious nor impartial. Pp. 1563-1565. 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 43 

After this the cannon had to be left to the enemy, the 
cavalry was dismounted, and the rear of Napoleon's 
army was left unprotected. Multitudes were frozen to 
death, and the wonder is that any escaped to tell the tale. 
Yet when they reached the Beresina, one of the broadest 
rivers of Europe, Napoleon was equal to the occasion, 
and so manoeuvred as to deceive the Russian generals, and 
effect a passage. He still remained equal to himself, but 
fate was against him. Fortune, which had always favored 
him thus far, even in the chances of escaping death on so 
many battlefields, now smiled on him no longer. It was 
as if the hand of destiny had set a mark beyond which he 
could not go; and although this included the suffering of 
millions, perhaps it was best that it should be so. The 
pendulum of reform and revolution had swung too far, 
and th,irty years of conservatism were needed to counter- 
balance it. Napoleon had no chance after 1812, but the 
Russians also suffered so severely that during the follow- 
ing campaign they were able to accomplish little, and but 
for the assistance of the Prussians must have been driven 
out of Germany. In 1813 Napoleon won his first three 
battles, with raw levies scarce twenty years of age. 

His downfall was a most terribly magnificent spectacle. 
Though he appears so hard-hearted, he really loved his 
men, and the loss of his army in Russia was like a perpetual 
bereavement. Still more keenly did he feel the immola- 
tion of his old veterans at Waterloo. No wonder he said 
to Fouche, on his last return to Paris, "Do not tell me to 
dare; I have dared too much already." What could be 
more tragical than his last look at France (as we may 
fancy it), from the deck of the Northumberland! What 
more pathetic than his memoirs ! A voice from St. Helena 
warning Europe to beware of its two great dangers; the 
"red cotton night-cap, " and the monstrous semi-barbarous 



44 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

power of Russia — two great avalanches ready to descend 
on civilization. This supreme man of action wasting away 
on a sultry tropical island! Certainly Csesar was more 
fortunate to fall at the base of Pompey's statue. 

For a time it seemed as if, after filling the world with 
confusion for twenty years, he had disappeared and left no 
result behind him. Europe needed rest in which to recup- 
erate from her wounds, and this could only come through 
a strong conservative reaction. The despotism of Met- 
ternich and the Holy Alliance was more intolerable than 
the severity of Napoleon, with his sumptuary laws and 
constant military training; but it was inevitable and had 
to be endured. It seemed for the time being as if the 
whole continent would be Russianized; but the spirit of 
equal rights was irrepressible. First came the revolution 
at Naples; then in Piedmont, Spain, Portugal, and Greece; 
and these were suppressed for the most part by Metternich 
and the sentimental Chateaubriand, and many patriots 
suffered martyrdom; yet a deep fermentation went on in 
society, and at length the July revolution in Paris changed 
the whole aspect of affairs in western Europe. 

When a ship loaded with cotton happens to take fire it 
will sometimes burn for days before this is discovered, 
and for days afterwards, while all attempts to quench the 
conflagration fail. When the deck begins to smoke and 
becomes too hot for the sailors to stand on, they take to 
their boats and escape as they best can. Such was the 
political situation in Europe between 1820 and 1848; and 
Metternich was the captain of the vessel. He strove man- 
fully to quench the flames, but at length even conservative 
Vienna became too hot for him, and he was obliged to 
retire to the cool shadows of his castle on the Rhine. He 
was a good man in himself and not without statesmanlike 
ability, but much too superficial. To his mental vision 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 45 

constitutional government must lead to republicanism, and 
republicanism to socialism; just as our prohibitionists 
suppose that drinking wine and beer leads to delirium 
tremens. 

After many vibrations of the political pendulum all 
Europe except Russia has now adopted the constitutional 
form, and the Code Napoleon is dominant from Munich 
to Cadiz, and between Sicily and the Straits of Dover. 
Napoleon is reported to have said that his laws would be 
remembered after his victories were forgotten; but they 
really belonged to one another, and the same principles 
underlie them both. 

He was not a scrupulous man, and, if he had been, would 
never have accomplished the work he was given to do. 
Like all great natures, he troubled himself little as to what 
his contemporaries thought of him. He cared more to en- 
act justice in this world than to have justice done him in 
the next. It is true he was severe, but the times were 
such as required severity; and I believe there is no instance 
in which he refused to listen to a suggestion in behalf of a 
revision of judgment. Metternich says that as a man he 
was neither moral nor immoral; and this coming from so 
vigorous an opponent has a good deal of value. Those 
who have the cares of empires resting on them find little 
leisure to be good according to the usual methods of human- 
ity. He has suffered somewhat from the stories that 
Madame Junot and other ladies of his court record of him; 
and it is better to believe these, and give Napoleon the 
full benefit of them, than to attempt any excuse for them. 
They are not charges of a serious nature. 

I was long troubled by hearing of Napoleon's crimes 
until I found an opportunity to examine them; whereupon 
they all became dissipated like morning mist. They are 
crimes only from the standpoint of hereditary privilege. 



46 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

His removal of the incapable king of Spain, which was 
already been commented on, is a typical instance of this. 
It is true that the negro general Toussaint died in a French 
prison, but we should be cautious about accepting Miss 
Martineau's statement that his death was caused by ill 
treatment. There was no reason why he should have 
been treated differently from other political prisoners, and 
Miss Martineau's writings are rarely exempt from the 
influence of the various philanthropies of which she was 
the champion. When a writer's sense of right and wrong 
becomes so far perverted as to treat the protection of 
national industries as a question of morality, there is no 
reason why we should pay him or her serious consideration. 
Napoleon's transportation of the Jacobin leaders to Guiana 
was a relief to French politics, and a tardy act of justice 
for the horrors of the Revolution, which could not have 
been obtained in any other manner. The perfection of 
government would only seem to be attained when there 
is a power above the law to rectify and amend its deficien- 
cies. 

Madame De Stael was banished for her impertinence; 
if it be not called downright impudence. A woman is 
never so intolerable as when she imagines herself to be an 
important political factor. Madame De Stael permitted 
herself to become a puppet for Napoleon's enemies, and 
no matter how powerful a chief magistrate may be he 
cannot afford to have men or women treat him with dis- 
respect. There was great rejoicing among sensible people 
in Paris at her departure; as there was also in the duchy of 
Weimar when she returned to her villa on the lake of Ge- 
neva. Her exile was no great hardship, and but for its 
long continuance might even be esteemed a blessing. 
The French people as a rule know too little about other 
coimtries, and her travels in Germany, Italy, and Eng- 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 47 

land broadened her mind and improved the quaKty of 
her writing. 

Napoleon's nearest approach to crime, and the most 
futile of his undertakings, was his divorce from Josephine. 
That, at least, was an offense against society. Yet it was 
not a crime, for many other men have done the same with- 
out being regarded as criminals. On his return from 
Egypt there was some trouble between them, but they 
were reconciled by the mediation of Hortense and Eugene. 
Again, when he became emperor he is reported to have 
had a severe struggle over the right of succession; for 
Josephine wished to have her own son take precedence of 
Napoleon's brothers. This statement does not come from 
very good authority, and may be incorrect. If the truth 
were known, it would probably appear that the divorce 
originated more from Napoleon's desire to have children 
of his own than from a wish to become allied to the house 
of Austria. There are many husbands who can sympathize 
with such a feeling. 

The cardinal sin of Napoleon's life, however, the one 
his enemies lay the severest stress on, was the supposed 
murder of the Due d'Enghien. There never was a much 
clearer case of accessory before the act than is found in the 
conduct of the duke. At the same time that Captain 
Wright landed Cadoudal and his accomplices on the 
French coast, the Due d'Enghien went to the duchy of 
Baden and stationed himself close to the French border. 
The duke was a fool to suppose he could make such a move 
on the chessboard without attracting Napoleon's attention. 
Its coincidence with the arrival of a number of mysterious 
persons in Paris was also noticed. Spies were at once 
set upon the duke's movements, and it was discovered 
that he made nocturnal excursions into French territory. 
He might have been arrested and condemned for this; 



48 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

but Napoleon waited until all the fish had been gathered 
into his net. It is not certainly known that the duke 
corresponded with Pichegru and Cadoudal; but no 
sane person doubts that he was acquainted with their 
movements. The British government might profess in- 
difference as to the methods by which the conspirators 
intended to overthrow Napoleon's government; but the 
same excuse will not answer for the Due d'Enghien. If an 
honest man is caught among thieves he suffers the penalty 
of his folly. It was the duke's business to have known the 
plans of the conspirators. He was court-martialed and 
executed as the associates of Wilkes Booth were court- 
martialed and executed for the murder of Lincoln. The 
assassination of a chief magistrate is the most hideous of 
all crimes, and the slightest effort towards it ought to be 
punished with death.* 

The massacre of his Turkish prisoners by Napoleon, in 
Syria, was atrocious enough, but the act was decided upon 
by a council of war, which Kleber, Junot, and other generals 
of high character attended. They had no provisions 
wherewith to feed the prisoners, and, if released, they would 
have rejoined the forces of the enemy. Christian prisoners 
might have been paroled, but for Turks that would have 
been a useless and ridiculous ceremony. They were 
treated as if their parole had already been broken; but 
it was a bad situation of affairs. 

The only act which appears to have caused him remorse 
was breaking the ice at Austerlitz. The cries of the 
drowning Russians haunted him. It was hardly worse 



*Every one should read Napoleon's own account of this conspiracy, 
(veracious on the very face of it) in the Voice from St. Helena, vol. i., p. 
290, which I did not see myself until after this statement was written. 
The English also consider the execution of Major Andre a crime of the 
same sort. 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 49 

than exploding the powder magazine of a frigate with hot 
shot would have been. There is no other instance like it in 
the history of warfare on land. Frederick or Marlborough 
might have done the same. 

Napoleon's civil administration is fairly exemplified by 
his treatment of the Jews. When questioned at St. Helena 
as to his reason for this liberality, he replied, "I wanted 
to make them leave off usury and become like other men. 
There were a great many Jews in the countries I reigned 
over; by removing their disabilities, and by putting them 
on an equality with Catholics, Protestants, and others, I 
hoped to make them become good citizens, and conduct 
themselves like others of the community. I believe that 
I should have succeeded in the end. My reasoning with 
them was — as their rabbins explained to them — that they 
ought not to practice usury to their own tribes, but were 
allowed to do so with Christians and others; that, there- 
fore, as I had restored them to all their privileges, and 
made them equal to my other subjects, they must consider 
me to be the head of their nation, like Solomon or Herod, 
and my subjects like brethren of a tribe similar to theirs; 
that, consequently, they were not permitted to practice 
usury with me or them, but to treat us as if we were of the 
tribe of Judah; that having similar privileges to my other 
subjects, they were in like manner to pay taxes and sub- 
mit to the laws of conscription and others. By this I 
gained many soldiers. Besides, I should have drawn great 
wealth to France, as the Jews are very numerous and would 
have flocked to a country where they enjoyed such superior 
privileges. Moreover, I wanted to establish a universal 
liberty of conscience. My system was to have no pre- 
dominant religion, but to allow perfect liberty of conscience 
and of thought, to make all men equal, whether Protest- 
ants, Catholics, Mahometans, Deists, or others; so that 



50 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

their religion should have no influence in getting them 
employment under government." It will be remembered 
that Julius Caesar also wished to alleviate the condition 
of the Jews. 

What a man is this! What lofty thought and noble 
statesmanship, expressed in sentences as chaste and fra- 
grant as rose petals! It is the doctrine of Christ trans- 
ferred into practical politics. There is nothing like it in 
Bacon or Locke or Macaulay. Just an hour before read- 
ing it I was perusing the Phsedo of Plato, and it was not 
easy to believe that I had changed from one writer to 
another. The powder-scorched man, with the marble 
temperament, had a most beautiful human soul within 
him. Such a man must either be an autocrat or noth- 
ing; for where could he find others whom he might take 
counsel with on equal terms. If he had not risen to 
power his whole life would have been an exile. 

Napoleon's bulletins are not so exaggerated as his 
enemies would have you believe; and yet they do not 
represent him fairly. They were written to suit the 
taste of the French people, who, in spite of their realistic 
art and literature, had so long been separated from reality 
that the simple truth, would no longer satisfy them. He 
must have smiled as he wrote them. In his letters to 
Joseph and in his conversations at St. Helena we come 
close to the man himself. The clearness of his thought 
and force of his ideas are emphasized by the unpretending 
directness of his style. It is like taking Manitou iron 
water to read him. He infuses energy into every nerve. 
If he had devoted himself to literature he would have 
been the greatest of French writers as he is now one of the 
best. He never composed any plays, but he knew human 
nature better than Moliere, and his sentiment was purer 
than Voltaire's or Racine's. He liked Eugene Beauhamais 



THE MAN OF DESTINY 51 

as a youth, because he wept at the sight of his father's 
sword. 

Napoleon discipHned the whole of Europe, and filled 
it with heroes. He aroused people from their slovenly, 
mechanical ways, and instructed them to a.ct with energy 
and precision; he woke them up from their drowsy, self- 
complacent lucubrations and set them to thinking in 
earnest. Wherever he went all idlers, parasites, vicious 
and dissipated persons were sent about their business. He 
disliked the monks because they lived in idleness, which 
he considered the root of all evil. We are indebted to 
Napoleon, not only for such grand characters as Ney, 
Victor, Murat, Junot, and Soult, but Wellington, Blucher, 
Canning, and Von Stein owe their places in history to him. 

Nor can it be doubted that he exercised an influence 
on great artists. It has been noticed that the best poetry 
of Schiller, Goethe, Byron, and Wordsworth was written 
between 1795 and 1810. Beethoven also intended at first 
to dedicate his heroic symphony to Napoleon. When we 
admire them we admire Napoleon also. A man, however, 
who tries to change, remodel, and transform everything 
must in the end set all the world against him. 

What comprehensive wisdom in his last directions to 
the child whom he had not seen for so many years: "My 
son shall reign a mighty monarch. He shall do good 
works and not attempt to avenge my death. To win 
great battles would be but to ape me." 

This did not come true of his son, but of his nephew; 
and if Napoleon III. had paid more strict attention to it 
he might not have died an exile in England. 



NAPOLEONIC MEMOIRS 
I 

MEMOIRS are not the most trustworthy of 
historical documents. They are commonly 
written in old age, long after the events 
referred to have taken place, and it is one 
of the peculiarities of our later years that the events of 
our boyhood or girlhood reappear much more distinctly 
to us "than those of mature life. Our imaginations also 
play strange tricks with us at times. I have myseK some- 
times supposed that I remembered an extract from a cer- 
tain author with perfect distinctness, but, on looking it 
up, I found the wording of it wholly different from what I 
supposed. Memoirs are also more likely to be prejudiced 
than any other form of composition, on account of the 
nearness of the author to his or her subject. The remem- 
brance of past favors, as well as grievances, trifling affairs 
in themselves, which otherwise he would not think of 
mentioning, enter into his mind and more or less influence 
his judgment. Recently published American memoirs 
like Conway's and White's are transparent enough with 
the predilections of the writer — Conway's partiality for 
his own section of the country, and White's feeling of 
obligation to those to whom he owed his foreign appoint- 
ments. A mischievous slander, played by a designing 
person or an intentionally sincere one; like the horrid 
calumny of Theodora, which was accepted by Gibbon, 
may impose upon the public for centuries. 

A review of the various memoirs concerning Napoleon 

52 



NAPOLEONIC MEMOIRS 53 

would constitute a large volume by itself. In fact, Rose- 
bery's recent work on Napoleon is little more than a dis- 
cussion of the records preserved by Napoleon's friends 
who shared his imprisonment at St. Helena. It is a fair 
and candid work for an Englishman, and a marked con- 
trast to the misrepresentations of Macaulay, Green, and 
Seeley; but it has limitations of its own which are worth 
a passing notice. Of these, the two most important are 
what he considers Napoleon's lack of judgment in his 
choice of men, and the peculiarity of his religious opinions. 

In regard to the first, I think it might almost be said 
that no other man has recognized merit so quickly and 
rewarded it so well as Napoleon did. It was largely to 
this that he owed his earlier successes. It would be diffi- 
cult to prove or disprove Rosebery's assertion. No one 
can tell what there may be in the ocean; but what have 
we ever heard of Wellington's or Blucher's subordinates? 
Murat, Ney, Soult, Lannes, Massena, and Victor are 
celebrated names in the history of those times ; and if they 
did not always accomplish what Napoleon hoped of them 
when they were fighting against the odds of two or three 
to one, the fact is not surprising. 

Massena was the only one of Napoleon's marshals, how- 
ever, to whom military critics have given the credit of 
being a great commander; and when we examine Napo- 
leon's campaigns, we find that it was always to Massena 
that he intrusted the most difficult commissions. He was 
already an invalid in his Spanish campaign, but Massena 
in his prime was probably a match for either Blucher or 
Wellington. His defeat of Swanoff at Zurich was a 
masterpiece of military skill. 

In regard to Napoleon's religion or philosophy, Rose- 
bery goes a long way off. He believes him to have been a 
Mohammedan and a materialist. The terms are contra- 



54 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

dictory. Mohammedanism is a sensual religion, but sensu- 
ality and materialism are not convertible terms, and for 
absolute faith in the divine will there are none like the 
followers of Islam. Materialism in philosophy invariably 
leads to skepticism, and a skeptical Mohammedan is as 
rare as a white blackbird. On the other side, sensuality 
was hateful to Napoleon, as everything was which tended 
to mental or physical weakness. His creed wa^ the gospel 
of strength. He courted the favor of the Sheiks in Egypt 
as Alexander did that of the Persian Magi, in order to 
obtain political, as well as military, control of the country; 
but there is no trustworthy evidence that he went so far in 
this as to compromise himself as a Christian. What we 
gather from the various comments on religious subjects 
which have been reported of Napoleon, is that he had no 
very definite religious creed, though a decided religious 
faith. He makes some such statement of himself some- 
where, and it is a very fine one. Such was the mental 
attitude of Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe, and many others, 
and it testifies to the depth and sincerity of Napoleon's 
moral nature. As Goethe states it in Faust: "Who can 
say I know Him, who can say I know Him not? " 

He was too much of an idealist to be called a materialist; 
too practical, perhaps, to be called an idealist. You 
might call him an idealist-atihtarian. His mind always 
preserved an equitable balance between theory and prac- 
tice. He read little philosophy and had a particular horror 
of what he called idealogues — doctrines such as Fourier and 
John Stuart Mill. 

Lord Rosebery , however, admits what Metternich denies 
that Napoleon was a true statesman; that ths earlier period 
of his government might be termed ideal; that he was by 
nature of a kindly disposition and wished to do what was 
right; that he preserved the fruits of the French Re volution 



NAPOLEONIC MEMOIRS m 

to posterity; that he was the greatest of generals, and one 
of the greatest of law givers; that his wars were mainly 
forced upon him; and that he had only one fair opportuni- 
ty of making peace (in the summer of 1806), which "either 
his suspicion or his madness" prevented him from seizing. 

It is generally supposed that the death of Charles James 
Fox prevented Napoleon from making peace with Eng- 
land in 1806, and Napoleon intimates this in a letter to 
his brother, Joseph, written at the time; but it is not 
probable that an enduring peace could have been con- 
summated, so long as Holland, Belgium, and France re- 
mained under the same government. 

In regard to the numerous records of Napoleon's mourn- 
ful life at St. Helena — ^the fifth act of the tragedy — ^Rose- 
bery considers General Gourgand's diary to be the most 
veracious and trustworthy, on the ground that it was 
evidently not intended for publication. This, like the 
others, cannot be proved, though he assigns plausible 
reasons which have their value; but it seems like a nar- 
row basis on which to form a judgment. In such cases 
the character of the individual should always be taken 
into account. General Gourgand was one of the bravest 
and most devoted of Napoleon's personal adherents, but 
his portrait, as well as his diary, indicates a man of not 
more than mediocre intellect. He served the Emperor as 
a sort of staff detective. He discovered the mines which 
were intended to blow up Napoleon at Moscow, and 
killed a dragoon who was attacking Napoleon at the battle 
of Brienne. Once, when the Emperor's party were out 
walking at St. Helena, they were threatened by a drunken 
or insane British soldier, who leveled his musket and 
ordered them to halt. Napoleon merely said: "General 
Gourgand, take charge of that fellow. " Gourgand made 



56 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

a sort of flank movement, then suddenly darted on the 
soldier and wrested his weapon from him in a twinkling. 

This, however, would seem to have been the limit of his 
capacity. Napoleon surely would not have approved of 
the statement which Gourgand published concerning the 
battle of Waterloo, that so offended the British ministry. 
He was a forcible man, but narrow and unimaginative. 
Napoleon could not have conversed with him on large 
and important subjects as he did with Montholon and 
Las Cases, and we consequently find that Gourgand's 
reports are meager and not particularly interesting. The 
most conspicuous fact in his diary is Napoleon's continual 
effort to cheer and encourage the spirit of his companions. 
Gourgand was still in the prime of life, and when other 
methods failed. Napoleon held forth to him the prospect 
of a favorable matrimonial alliance — ^which came to pass 
some ten years later by Gourgand's marriage to a French 
countess. 

Lord Rosebery has examined the evidence in Surgeon 
O'Meara's case against Sir Hudson Lowe and finds much 
of it quite untrustworthy. This need not, however, make 
any serious difference to us. The civilized world has 
long ago condemned Sir Hudson Lowe, nor has he ever 
found an apologist for his absurdly spiteful behavior, and 
nobody cares to hear any further discussion in regard to 
him. Rosebery himself admits that the general mass of 
evidence is decidedly against Sir Hudson. What still 
makes the "voice from St. Helena" interesting are Napo- 
leon's commentaries on his battles and other important 
matters which it contains. O'Meara could not have in- 
vented these, and they agree remarkably well with the 
statements made afterwards by Montholon and Las Cases. 
O'Meara has this advantage over the others, that being 
imacquainted with the history of those times, he could 



NAPOLEONIC MEMOIRS 57 

ask Napoleon more direct and pertinent questions than 
they very well could, from fear of inquiring about matters 
which they might be supposed to know already. 

The best of the Napoleonic memoirs are those by Las 
Cases and Savary, both men of superior character and 
intelligence. Savary, the Duke of Rovigo, was a brave 
soldier, and brave men are much more likely to be truth- 
ful than those whose courage has never been tested; 
witness Grant and Sherman. Savary did not prove an 
able commander, but Napoleon made use of him to dis- 
cover the movements of the Russians at Friedland, and 
to open communication with Davout at Eckmuhl — at the 
risk of a dozen lives. His accoimts of the battle of Auster- 
litz, Friedland, and Eckmiihl, although incomplete, have 
the vitality of an eye-witness. After Fouche's retirement 
Napoleon made Savary superintendent of pohce. He 
followed the Emperor to England, but he was proscribed 
by Louis XVIII. and the British government imprisoned 
him at Gibraltar, when he afterwards escaped to Asia 
Minor and returned to France after twelve years of exile. 
His life was one of the most adventurous and interesting 
of that stirring period. 

He was a man of astute intelligence and his writing 
has much of the frankness, directness, and perspicacity of 
Napoleon's own. If he appears somewhat too favorable 
to Napoleon, it is not in what he says, but in what he 
leaves unsaid. His points are well taken, and his remarks 
on the condemnation and execution of the Due d'Enghien 
are the most judicious of any among his contemporaries. 

Count Las Cases belonged to the old French nobility, 
and his writing has the tone of high cultivation. He fled 
to England at the outset of the Reign of Terror and sup- 
ported himseK there by the publication of what he called 
an atlas, but which would seem to have been an epitome 



58 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

of the history of nations.* He returned to France by 
favor of Napoleon's amnesty, and soon became so con- 
vinced of the good intentions of the Emperor that he ac- 
cepted a position in the government. Napoleon, however, 
saw or knew little of him, until after the battle of Waterloo 
he was surprised by Las Cases 's determination to accom- 
pany him in exile. Las Cases was sent away from St. 
Helena by Sir Hudson for secret though perfectly honorable 
communication with Napoleon's friends in Europe. Sir 
Hudson made a mistake, and attempted to rectify it by 
having Las Cases detained at the Cape of Good Hope for 
some six months, during which time he suffered severely 
from the vindictiveness of the British officials there. He 
was not permitted to land in England for fear of the in- 
formation he might circulate concerning the ill-treatment 
of Napoleon, but he was hustled over to Rhenish Prussia 
where he suffered similar grievances to those at the Cape. 
His book bears every mark of an honorable man and a 
conscientious writer. 



*He afterwards republished this in Paris under a nom de plume, but 
the French Academy frowned upon it. Las Cases reports that one of 
the Academicians told him that " they did not believe in literary work 
which emanated from the nobility." This was the way in which they 
afterwards treated Dr. Morton, the discoverer of etherization. 



NAPOLEONIC MEMOIRS 
II 

BOURIENNE'S memoirs, mifortmiately, are not 
to be trusted at all. Even if they were not 
written, as Savary states, by an unknown person 
and signed by Bourienne after he became de- 
mented, the character of the man is very much against 
them. He was discharged from Napoleon's service for 
complicity in a shameful stock-jobbing operation; and 
though Napoleon afterwards relented and sent him as 
consul to Hamburg, he never permitted Bourienne to be 
near him after that time. His story in regard to Napo- 
leon's amour with the wife of a captain of infantry lacks 
confirmation. His talk is too much like that of a dis- 
charged servant. 

Romancing comes naturally to a French woman. Both 
Madame Junot and Madame de Remusat had grievances 
of their own against the Emperor. It is well known that 
the father of Madame de Remusat attached himself to 
Talleyrand, and went out of office with him in 1810. 
Madame Junot's grievance was of a more subtle kind. 
Her husband was one of the Emperor's favorite com- 
manders and yet he never was created a marshal of France. 
A lack of dignified character may have been a sufficient 
reason for this, but his wife, of course, could not under- 
stand it, and unquestionably felt it as a slight. In her 
earlier household reminiscences of Napoleon she appears 
in quite an amiable light, but she did not sustain this 
character in after life, and the Emperor spoke of her as 

59 



60 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

rather a flashy sort of person. The society she moved in 
certainly was not high-toned^ — witness the remark she 
recounts, made in company, about Pauline Bonaparte's 
ears — and her small animosities are sometimes very amus- 
ing. One of the results of Madame de Remusat's memoirs 
has been the republication of Las Cases's, O'Meara's, and 
other memoirs more favorable to Napoleon. 

It is impossible to determine what is fact and what may 
be fiction in these feminine memoirs. 

It is remarkable what a strong Creole element pervaded 
Parisian society during the second empire. Madame de 
Montholon was a Creole, and an English lady who resided 
some time at St. Helena, considered her a very tyrannical 
wife. Josephine could not very well be that; but all 
accounts agree that she was one of the most extravagant 
women ever known to the historical pen. Napoleon, after 
praising her natural grace of manner, and the pleasantness 
of her disposition to O'Meara, concluded with the blunt 
remark that she rolled up mountains of debt and then 
told lies about them. She probably prevaricated from 
embarrassment, but all accounts agree that while Napoleon 
was in Egypt she contracted a mass of debts equal to 
several times the amount of his salary and if he had not 
risen to autocratic power he never could have liquidated 
them. False pride is the besetting sin of womankind. 
Josephine considered herself above paying for the articles 
that she purchased, or even inquiring their price. She 
wished to please everybody, which is the same as pleasing 
nobody; and she purchased almost every article that was 
offered her. Las Cases states that she bought thirty-eight 
hats in one month. Such a woman could have little depth 
either of character or of affection. There was nothing 
Napoleon hated so much as foolishness; and it is probable 



NAPOLEONIC MEMOIRS 61 

that he contemplated separating from Josephine a long 
time before he did so. 

Marie Louise having been born to the purple, acted very 
differently. She only purchased what she really wished 
to have, and paid for it at the time. She showed true 
dignity of character during the trying scenes of 1814, and 
her only fault would seem to have been a lack of modesty — 
natural enough considering the family she came from. 

Napoleon did not often compare men to animals, but 
when he did there was a reason for it. He thought Sir 
Hudson Lowe looked like a tiger cat; and that is just what 
he did look like according to the steel portrait in the last 
edition of Las Cases's memoirs. A long lean neck, a shal- 
low pate, and sharp angular features bespeak a most un- 
amiable disposition. His face is a bad one, and the only 
talent he seems to have possessed was that of tormenting 
those who were under his authority. His detention of a 
portrait of Napoleon's son, which was sent from Vienna 
was typical of all his proceedings. Napoleon informed 
him In their third and last interview that he and Lord 
Bathurst would only be remembered by posterity for their 
inhuman treatment of him. It was safe enough to predict 
that. The British government spent between two and 
three hundred thousand dollars a year to keep Napoleon 
at St. Helena, and yet the rooms he occupied there were 
like those of an American tenement-house; nor was his 
table much better served. He certainly was not treated 
like a gentleman; and who was ultimately responsible for 
this so much as the Duke of Wellington? After O'Meara's 
return to England the facts concerning Napoleon's confine- 
ment became widely known, and it is not a supposable case 
that Wellington should have been ignorant of them. He 
was the autocrat of Great Britain for the time being, and 
the thought of Napoleon must have been of daily occur- 



62 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

rence to him. As Rosebery says, Wellington was not a 
generous adversary and Wellington was the real govern- 
ment. 

One other remark of Rosebery deserves a momentary 
consideration. He speaks of Napoleon as not having a 
good seat in the saddle. I suppose some Englishmen would 
think more of this than they would of losing a battle. A 
man with a figure like Napoleon's could hardly make a 
fine-looking horseman; but he rode over more battlefields 
than any commander before or since Julius Csesar, and 
we do not hear that he was thrown except at Arcole, where 
his horse was mortally wounded. At Arsis -Sur-Aube he 
rode onto a bursting bombshell probably with the intention 
of ending his life in that manner. His horse was disabled 
by the explosion, and yet Napoleon kept his seat. He 
depended largely on rapid riding to escape capture or 
assassination. In this way he once arrived in Paris before 
his ministers were cognizant that he had left Spain. 

Thiers's "Consulate and Empire" derives great advan- 
tage from the fact that the incidents of those times were 
still fresh in the memories of the actors. Thiers could 
obtain information from Napoleon's marshals, generals, 
colonels, and even from the soldiers of the old guard. 
This has given his account a freshness and pictorial liveli- 
ness such as later writers will have to struggle for in vain, 
unless they possess the genius of Tacitus or Carlyle. Karl 
Lemeke, in his "Aesthetics" takes notice that Thiers knew 
how to poetize; but the poetry was not in the man, but in 
his subject- — the chivalrous crusade of a whole nation 
fighting against mighty odds to liberalize Europe and 
break the shackles of fossilized institutions. Thiers is by 
no means a classic. He is a diffuse, watery writer, and 
appears to have taken small pains with his sentences. His 
worst fault, however, is the constant harping on Napoleon's 



NAPOLEONIC MEMOIRS 63 

"inordinate ambition," which finally becomes as weari- 
some as the sound of the Alpine horn to travellers over the 
Wengern Alps. 

Thiers understood politics too well to believe this him- 
self, and the reason for it was obviously to obtain publica- 
tion for his book, under a Bourbon king. Louis Philippe 
was a liberal, but we could not expect him to be so liberal 
as to permit the French people to understand that the 
Bonapartes were right, and the Bourbons were wrong. 
Thiers, therefore, compromised to suit the situation — no 
doubt reluctantly enough. There are few histories which 
do not suffer from similar perversions of the truth. 

In spite of this we may fairly suppose that it was the 
"Consulate and Empire" which upset Louis Philippe, and 
made a final end of the Bourbons. Its publication was 
of great assistance to Louis Napoleon's designs and this 
may have been more than Thiers expected or wished for. 

No man, since the world began, has ever been so lied 
about as Napoleon. It is one measure of his importance. 
The British officers on the Northumberland were never 
tired of questioning Bertrand, Las Cases and the rest, 
concerning the emperor's character, habits of living, etc., 
and expressed much surprise at the replies they received. 
They admitted that he had been grossly misrepresented. 
This was the work of dishonest journalism, of which I have 
noticed the effect, even to the present day — improbable 
scandals, and stories of his cruelty and cowardice. 

Five hundred people will read the newspapers while one 
will read a dignified history; and of this five hundred 
nine-tenths will believe what they read as if it were the 
Gospel of St. Matthew, During the peace of Amiens 
Napoleon complained to the British Ministry of the atro- 
cious calumnies concerning him that were published in 
English newspapers, but the ministry replied that they 



64 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

had no legal right to interfere with the liberty of the press 
and his only remedy would be to enter a suit for libel in an 
English court. This was true enough, but it is not sur- 
prising that Napoleon should never afterwards have ap- 
proved of that form of liberty. 

Such calumnies would have been dangerous in Germany 
as the death of the book-seller, Koch, afterward exemplified ; 
but the Prussians circulated wood-cuts of the infant 
Bonaparte coddled in the arms of a demon, and other 
pictures of dark and dubious insinuation. Such black- 
guardism always happens in time of war, but it has never 
been so virulent or enduring as in Napoleon's case, and 
this for most excellent reasons. The hereditary sover- 
eigns and the titled aristocracy could only justify their 
repeated attempts to suppress this champion of struggling 
humanity and incite their subjects and serfs to fight against 
him by the most shameless falsification. The same mis- 
representation is now taking place in American history. 
Slavery is dead, but the pro-slavery spirit still lives, and 
sits in the professor's chair. They acted like the villain 
in Moliere's play, who screened himself by bringing accusa- 
tions against the persons he had injured. They had 
however, this kind of justification, in fact, that even if the 
peace of Amiens had been kept through Napoleon's life- 
time, such a ruler would have made the French nation so 
powerful that under a less judicious successor it would 
have been dangerous to its neighbors. 

O'Meara reports that Sir Hudson Lowe once remarked 
to him that Napoleon's death "would be of little conse- 
quence, compared with the mischief that might ensue if 
he escaped — not so much of himself as in the revolutions 
that would be excited in various parts of Europe. " This 
would seem to indicate that even subordinate officers in 
the British army understood the character of the conflict 



NAPOLEONIC MEMOIRS 65 

they were engaged in better than they pretended. Na- 
poleon only escaped in death; but the revolutions took 
place, nevertheless, and continued to take place until 
France, Spain, Italy, and even Prussia, were liberated 
from the despotism of Metternich and the so-called Holy 
Alliance. The Tory leader in Parliament even declared 
at that time (1816) that the Anglo-Saxon race was the 
only one fit for a constitutional government. 

In Las Cases's memoirs there are statements made by 
Napoleon himself, which strongly support the view I have 
taken of him in the preceding lecture. He speaks of the 
autocratic period of his government as a kind of dictator- 
ship, like those of Sulla and Csesar, "which would have 
come to an end when peace was firmly established." 
" He was necessary for the defense of France, and to pre- 
serve the principles of the Revolution. The coalition 
always existed either openly or secretly." It was not 
the crowned heads of Europe that hated him, "so nluch 
as the aristocracy, which is always cold, implacable, and 
vindictive." They want everything for themselves. If 
he did dream of universal empire, it was his enemies that 
led him into it. He did not like the ceremonial of court 
life; and he had an idea if he lived long enough to abdicate 
in favor of his son, and to spend the evening of his life 
travelling from one capital to another examining into 
public affairs, giving advice, and establishing new institu- 
tions for the benefit of the people. Savary alleges that 
Napoleon undertook his Egyptian expedition, for one 
reason, because he considered the sword-points of the 
enemy less dangerous than the jealousy of his fellow 
directors; and that the overthrow of the Directory on his 
return was a question of self preservation for himself and 
his friends. Thiers was of opinion that it prevented the 



66 POIJTICS AND METAPHYSICS 

establishment of a pretorian government by the army, — 
like that of the Roman Empire. 

Better than Savary, and perhaps the best of all memoirs 
are Napoleon's own. They are said to be inaccurate, but 
I, who have been over the whole subject seven or eight 
times, have not noticed this. There are inaccuracies in 
all histories, for three-fourths of history is written from 
memory — either the writer's or some other person's. 
Napoleon himself has pointed out mistakes in Heroditus, 
which no Greek scholar would seem to have noticed; but 
Napoleon's signal merit is that he understood human 
nature. His account of the Marengo campaign is a match 
for Thucydides's description of the Syracusean expedition. 
John Ropes says that what happened at the battle of 
Marengo will probably never be known, but Napoleon 
gives such a clear and comprehensive account that we 
cannot only see the man fighting — the rout of Victor's 
divisions, and the charge of Kellermann's cuirassiers — but 
we can perceive the working of Napoleon's mind and 
understand the plans of his adversary. There is no 
ambiguity in the tactics of this battle. Napoleon in his 
anxiety for Suchet, who was on the other side of the enemy 
pushed his right wing forward to Marengo, where it was 
attacked the next morning by the whole Austrian army, 
and was driven out in great confusion. The enemy next 
fell upon Lannes, who commanded the centre, but Lannes 
retreated in good order, always, as Napoleon says, refusing 
his left wing; and the effect of this movement was to draw 
the Austrians round in the arc of a circle; so that they 
finally exposed their right fiank to the attack of Desaix 
and Kellermann, who were not slow to take advantage of 
this. Victor's division was reformed, and in less than an 
hour the Austrian army had become a fiying mob. It is 
a very rare book now, and ought to be republished with 



NAPOLEONIC MEMOIRS 67 

notes and corrections. It would be a pleasant contrast 
to the tame academic histories of the present day. 

After Napoleon's death, Sir Hudson Lowe, wandered 
about the earth ignored by his former employers, and 
generally avoided almost like a discharged convict. 

Napoleon was in all respects an exceptional man and 
has to be viewed exceptionally. His powers of endurance 
exceeded that of any other individual of whom there is 
even a tradition. He worked with his secretaries until 
they fell asleep from exhaustion; and at Arcole for four 
nights he never took off his boots. Before he was twenty- 
eight years old he had won seventeen battles. His features 
were refined and classic, but his earlier coins represent him 
with an uncommonly thick neck, and it may have been in 
some exceptional structure of the spinal column that his 
powers of endurance are to be accounted for. 



THE POETIC NAPOLEON 

NO great man is complete without the poetic 
element. It is to be found in Lincoln's Gettys- 
burg address, and in Sumner's solemn affir- 
mation before the Senate: "Thank God for 
Massachusetts ! " It was in the poetic element that Demos- 
thenes surpassed Cicero, and perhaps Webster. Victor 
Hugo wrote to Garibaldi in his highflown manner, "There 
was a lyre in the tent of Achilles." ^Eschylus fought at 
Salamis and Dante at Campaldino. Frederick the Great 
sent his verses to Voltaire, "Heroes or Poets." There 
was not much poetry in Frederick, although he was fond 
of scribbling verses, and Bismarck was also a rather 
matter of fact character; but Napoleon was charged with 
it; although he may never have composed a couplet. His 
ambitions and successes were poetic, and so were his 
failures; even his misdeeds (or mistakes) have that appear- 
ance. His whole life was like the rising and setting of the 
sun. His actions were poetic; he talked poetry; he was 
continually meeting with poetic adventures; his whole 
life was an epic, and some hundreds of years from now it 
might become the subject of as grand an epic as Dante's 
"Inferno" or Milton's "Paradise Lost." 

The early incidents which Madam Junot relates of him 
have a poetic character, — ^the Puss in Boots story, and his 
mercifulness to Sallicetti because he had taken refuge in 
the house of Napoleon's friends. Then what a picture we 
have of this young artillery officer, with the big head and 

68 



THE POETIC NAPOLEON 69 

tapering figure, giving the word of command^ — only one 
word — ^which puts an end to the Reign of Terror in France. 
Again we see him in Italy, like Thor fighting the giants, 
driving armies before him, two or three times the number 
of his own. We see him leading his men across the bridge 
of Lodi, and rescued by his devoted followers from the 
swamps of Arcole. Homer represents Achilles as fighting 
in impenetrable armor, which is his way of saying that 
the hero was protected by divine intervention, and it 
seems as if nothing less could have saved Napoleon in his 
eighteen Italian battles. 

His Egyptian expedition was like the voyage of Ulysses. 
He eluded the Polyphemus Nelson, who proposed to shut 
him up in an iron cage like Bajazet, and looking up at the 
stars he said to the atheistic scientists about him, "You 
may talk, gentlemen, but tell me who made all that," — 
memorable words. When his regiments were drawn up 
for the battle of the Pyramids, he said to them: "Soldiers, 
forty centuries look down upon you." Like Moses of 
old, he led them across the Red Sea, and saved them from 
drowning by the miracle of his marvelous brain. He gives 
up his horse to a womided soldier, and walks through the 
desert with his infantry. He learns from an English 
newspaper of the defeat of Moreau in Italy and the perilous 
condition of France, and he flies to the rescue of his country 
like a lover to his sweetheart. He overturns the incapable 
Directory, establishes a sound government, and scatters 
the enemies of France to the winds. Five times he does 
this, in the space of fourteen years. 

Crossing over the Alps he stops to listen to the tolling 
of a monastery bell. "How sweetly that bell sounds," 
he says, "in this desolate region." Savary found him in 
the midst of the defeat at Marengo, before the final victory 
lying on the ground and quietly studying a map of Italy. 



70 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

He replies to the envoys of the Venetians, "Your govern- 
ment is superannuated. I will have no more Senate, no 
more inquisitors. I will be an Attila to the Venetian 
state, " — including the history of Venice in a single Shakes- 
pearian sentence. Soon after he had disposed of their 
superannuated government the population of Venice 
doubled its numbers. 

One of the finest of the Napoleonic anecdotes, and the 
most significant in its character, is one that he told Las 
Cases of himself at St. Helena. He was going on a jour- 
ney to Italy, when walking beside the carriage up the 
slope of Mount Talare, he overtook an old woman, hobbling 
with a crutch, and said to her, "My good woman what 
are you doing here, in this wild place?" "I have come, " 
she replied, "in the hope of seeing the Emperor Napoleon 
when he passes by." "What do you care for him?" said 
the Emperor again. "You have only exchanged one 
tyrant for another. It was formerly tyrant Louis, and 
now it is Napoleon." "No!" responded the old woman. 
"There is a great difference. Napoleon is the Emperor 
of the people." 

Here he breaks off and leaves us in the dark as to whether 
the old dame discovered the identity of her chance acquain- 
tance, but we may presume that she finally did, and that 
she raised her apron to her face to conceal the tears of 
joy. 

It was Napoleon's practice (and I have never heard of 
another commander who did the same) to ride over his 
battlefields after a victory to see that the wounded men 
were properly cared for. This, of course, greatly endeared 
him to his soldiers, but it would be thinking evil to con- 
sider that he did it on that account. He was riding over 
the bloody field of Wagram in this manner, when he came 
upon the dead body of a colonel who had done him an ill 



THE POETIC NAPOLEON 71 

turn in earlier years. "Poor fellow," said Napoleon, 
"there he lies; and I wish he knew that I had long since 
forgiven him." A little farther he found a grenadier 
lying on his back with a bullet hole in his forehead, and 
the lower part of his face covered with dirt from the 
explosion of a shell. The Emperor alighted from his horse 
and wiped the dirt from the man's mouth and nose with 
his handkerchief. The soldier opened his eyes, recognized 
Napoleon, and wept. What a sight that must have been 
to him — his last on this earth. 

On another battlefield he came upon a dog mourning 
over the body of his dead master, an Austrian officer, and 
Napoleon, speaking of it afterward, said, "I was almost 
ashamed to think that the devotion of that poor dog 
affected me more deeply than anything else there. " Yet 
many others would have felt as he did; and it is a poetic 
picture that we have here — Napoleon stopping his horse to 
reflect on the attachment and unhappiness of a poor dog. 

Then, the burning of Moscow! None but the French 
army and its commander, who called it the grandest, most 
terrible sight ever beheld by man, witnessed this. It was 
a presage of their coming misfortunes. Sixteen years of 
uninterrupted success had reached its climax, and now 
the change of fortunes was to be sharp and sudden. Na- 
poleon's plans continued to be good, but some accident 
always interfered to prevent their realization. 

Armies alone could not defeat this man. The first 
battle that he really lost, although he had rather the worst 
of it at Essling, was the battle of Leipsic, the most terrible 
battle of modern times. Napoleon was heavily outnum- 
bered, but it was the desertion of the Saxon contingent of 
fifteen thousand men who went over to the enemy with 
sixty cannon that did the mischief. The transfer of such 
a force to the opposite side was of less consequence than 



72 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

the disarrangement of Napoleon's plans, and its disheart- 
ening effect upon the French. Yet the first day he gained 
some slight success and held possession of his ground. On 
the second day both armies rested from exhaustion and, 
in order to bury the dead. Napoleon and his marshals 
rode over the field. It was a terrible sight. Every face 
was dark, and Napoleon was the first to say, "We shall 
have to retreat. " On the third day he drew up his army* 
in the concave order, and waited for the allies to attack 
him. His position was not a strong one, but all the 
nations of northern and eastern Europe were hurled 
against it in vain. At nightfall his line was nowhere 
broken. The battle was lost, but Napoleon was not 
defeated. That evening he said to Murat, "I foresee 
that you will desert me — ^but I forgive you." At day- 
break he commenced his retreat, but the premature blow- 
ing up of a bridge left one-third of his army at the mercy 
of the enemy. Murat deserted him with nearly twenty 
thousand men, and the Bavarian general. Von Werder, 
with more than that number. 

The king of Bavaria even contemplated a hideous pro- 
ceeding. In order to curry favor with his former enemies 
he ordered his army to the Rhine to intercept Napoleon 
and make him a prisoner; but the French soldiers were 
so enraged at being debarred from their own country that 
they flung themselves upon the Bavarians like tigers, 
slaughtered thousands of them and severely wounded 
their commander. Von Werder. Murat, who tried a 
similar game, was also defeated in Italy by Prince Eugene, 
the magnanimous son of Josephine Beauharnais. 

It should always be remembered that Napoleon made 
overtures for peace, after the second day's battle at Leipsic 
but this customary right of the vanquished was refused 

*Nov. 4, 1813. 



THE POETIC NAPOLEON 73 

him. Neither should we forget the names of his marshals 
who remained constant to their duty in these dark days 
of fortune. They were chiefly Davout, Soult, Ney, 
Bestrand, Berthier, McDonald, Victor, Grouchy, Van- 
damme, and Gerard. Massena's heart was true, but he 
was now an invalid and retired from active service. 

Read Thiers's account of the campaign of 1814, all the 
more poetic from the prosaic nature of the politician, who 
has here given us the plain, unvarnished facts that speak 
so eloquently of themselves. That little army of heroes 
contending against five times their own number, fighting 
ten battles in six weeks, never fairly defeated, and several 
times victorious, but losing strength even by their victories 
— when has history seen the like of it? Under similar 
conditions the army of Murat melted away like spring 
snow, but we do not hear of any desertions from Napoleon's 
ranks, hopeless as his soldiers may have considered the 
cause, for which they spent their blood. At Montmirail 
Napoleon captured one-fourth of the Prusso-Russian army, 
and with an adequate force would have utterly destroyed 
it. At Montreux he defeated the Austrians, and drove 
them back to the boundaries of France; but his army 
dwindled from fifty to forty thousand, and from forty to 
thirty -three thousand. 

All this time he was endeavoring to make peace, ready 
to accept any terms that would be honorable to France; 
but as often as he agreed to the offers of the allies, they 
raised fresh objections, until it became evident that their 
peace congress at Soissons was only intended to throw 
dust in the eyes of the people. Napoleon must have felt 
at this time like a man who is hunted by bloodhounds 
and the ineffectual dose of laudanum at Fontainebleau 
was the natural outcome of it. 

Again we behold him on the island of Elba. The allies 



74 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

have not kept their faith with him. They have taken his 
wife and child from him ; they have confiscated his proper- 
ty; they have not paid the stipend which they agreed for 
his support. He has escaped the Count d'Artois's assassin 
by a trifling accident. Welhngton has proposed to the 
Congress of Vienna to have him removed to the Azores 
and to have Murat removed from the kingdom of Naples, 
• — a most shameful breach of trust and good faith, without 
which the battle of Waterloo might not have taken place. 
What is Napoleon to do? Shall he submit tamely, and 
await the fate before him, or shall he make one last desper- 
ate plunge for independence? If he can regain his throne 
even for a short period, he will be able to provide for his 
brothers and their families.* 

In this hard dilemma he consulted his mother, perhaps 
for the first time in his life, and she said to him, " Go, my 
son, and may God be with thee." Every one knows the 
story of that wonderful return — ^the most marvelous of his 
exploits. How he wound his way like a hare through the 
dangers that surrounded him, — how the army that was 
sent to capture him went over to him, and his soldiers 
wept when they saw him again; how the Bourbons and 
Talleyrand fled like frightened deer at his approach! 
The army was with him and the people were with him, 
but the shrewder sort of men feared only too correctly that 
his triumph would be of short duration. There was no 
one to receive him at the Tuilleries; and as he entered 
those great silent halls, he felt a chill come over him, and 
he said, "This is a fine escapade I have made." Yet it 
was a triumph in its kind. 

After Waterloo, when Napoleon was leaving Paris for 
the last time, a crowd of mechanics and laborers gathered 



*In his last letter to Joseph, in 1814, Napoleon admonished his brothers 
to observe the strictest economy. 



THE POETIC NAPOLEON 75 

abotit his carriage and cheered him as it drove away. 
"Poor creatures," he said, "what do they owe to me? I 
found them poor and I have left them poor." Nothing 
else brings us so near to the heart of Napoleon as this 
statement — his sympathy for those who labor and are 
heavy laden, that a large proportion of mankind are 
destined to this, and that it is impossible to prevent it. 
The life of a soldier is much to be preferred, even with 
its risk of death or mutilation, to that of the coal miner, 
the marble worker, or the thread-lace maker. 

The German soldiers who had been promised constitu- 
tional government if they would conquer Napoleon, were 
greatly disheartened on' their return home to find that the 
old order of politics was everywhere to be restored. Old 
Bliicher talked about "those rascals," and Goethe's son 
openly declared that the Germans had driven out their 
greatest benefactor. It is more than probable that the 
king of Prussia would have kept his word to the Prussian 
people if he had not been intimidated by Metternich and 
Lord Castlereagh. The Uberal reforms instituted by the 
king of Wiirtemburg and the duke of Weimar were im- 
mediately suppressed by the Holy Alliance, 

There are many, even among Napoleon's admirers 
who have failed to realize the true nature and makeup of 
the man. Dr. Ropes, whose excellent work on Napoleon 
always deserves consideration, once said to me: " I do 
not consider Napoleon personally interesting, and I doubt 
if he was an agreeable companion. I have friends whom 
I believe to be much more interesting than Napoleon was. 
He was a sort of great, rough Silas Lapham. " Nothing 
could be farther from the mark. It is doubtful if any 
Frenchman would much resemble Howell's ideal Western- 
er; as for Napoleon, his native gentleness, kindliness, and 
amiabihty were almost feminine. Besides this, he was a 



76 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

man of superior refinement. Josephine once thought to 
entertain him by introducing a diminutive dwarf into 
his room. The dwarf was brought in in a covered basket 
but Napoleon was not pleased at the sight of this abortion 
of nature. "Take him away!" he said, " It is horrible." 
What an improvement since the time when a dwarf and a 
jester were considered essential to a royal household. 

His manner became more dictatorial in course of time 
but his numerous campaigns did not roughen him up, as 
they did Frederick the Great. He disliked Rabelais and 
all indecent conversation. 

He was remarkably patient for a man who had such a 
heavy burden on his shoulders — or rather on his brain. 
That he sometimes lost patience is not surprising, but his 
well-known bursts of anger were more often assumed than 
real. It was the readiest way by which he could produce 
the impression he desired. He once slapped a soldier in the 
face and then pardoned him for striking an officer. The 
fellow had been court-martialed and condemned to be shot. 

Readers of the "Voice from St. Helena" will remember 
that on one occasion Surgeon O'Meara having a fit of 
indigestion, bled himself for it, according to the absurd 
medical practice of the time, the consequence of which 
was, that when he went to pay a visit to Napoleon he 
fainted and fell flat on the floor. On coming to his senses 
he saw the Emperor bending over him with an expression 
of anxious solicitude which he never forgot. As soon as 
he was in a condition to return to his quarters. Napoleon 
ordered one of his attaches to accompany him for fear he 
might have another fainting spell on the way. 

Napoleon was kind to thousands; but the remarkable 
part of it is that a man could be so kind and yet see men 
dying about him on a battlefield without visible effect 
upon his nerves. 



NAPOLEON'S MARSHALS 

IT may not be out of order at this time to say some- 
thing of Napoleon's marshals; and they certainly 
deserve it. 
Massena was the best of them; so it is easy to see, 
from the use that Napoleon made of him. He may fairly 
be termed a great general. His victory over Swaroff at 
Zurich saved France from invasion and was fully equal 
to some of Napoleon's best. The Austrians' plan in 1805 
was to retard Napoleon in Southern Germany, while the 
Archduke Charles re-conquered Italy. Massena spoiled 
the latter part of this program, by a hard-fought, indecisive 
battle, from which both commanders derived much credit. 
In 1809, he saved the French army, on the terrible field 
of Essling, by his indomitable courage and good judgment. 
In 1810 he drove Wellington out of Spain, but was obliged 
to retire from active service the following year. Napoleon 
said of him: "Massena is covetous,* but he has qualities 
as a soldier, before which we all should bow the head. " 

Davout comes next to Massena. With twelve thousand 
men he defeated the Duke of Brunswick at Auerstadt 
with sixty thousand. There has been no other such 
battle in modern tim6s; and it is difficult to understand it 
for the Prussians were completely routed. In 1809 he 
held the whole Austrian army at bay for two days, until 
Napoleon could come to his assistance; for which service 

*He robbed a church in Italy but Napoleon compelled him to make 
restitution. 

77 



78 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

he was created prince of Auerstadt and Eckmuhl, a two- 
fold honor, not accorded to any other general of the 
empire. It is thought that if Napoleon had employed 
him in the Waterloo campaign, the result might have been 
different. He was a severe disciplinarian, but a modest, 
unpretending patriot. When the allies invaded France 
in 1815 Davout, wanted to fight them and promised a 
victory, if he was not killed in the first two hours. The 
more cautious Soult, however, advised against it. 

Lannes was a rough and ready soldier, but out of place 
anywhere except in camp, He won the battle of Mon- 
tibello from the Austrians, and completely dispersed the 
Spanish army at Tudela. It was said of him that he 
never would learn prudence, and yet it was by an act of 
prudence that he lost his life. He was struck by a cannon- 
ball while leading his horse across an exposed and danger- 
ous position. 

Murat is the most famous of cavalry leaders; though 
perhaps not better than Ziethen or Seidlitz. Napoleon 
said: "I would tell Murat to destroy four or five regiments 
for me, and it was done on the instant. It is a wonder 
that he was not killed, for he was a very conspicuous 
object." What may have saved him was his constant 
activity; wheeling about, and directing the movements 
of his squadrons. His white plume is well known, but 
he also dressed in a green coat and buff trousers. He 
would seem to have been invincible in single combat. At 
Aboukir he wounded and captured the commander of the 
Turkish army; and on the retreat from Moscow he killed 
a number of Cossacks with his own sabre. It is sad to 
think that such a man should have disgraced himself by 
treachery, at the termination of his life. He not only 
deserted his great benefactor after the battle of Leipsic, 
but issued a shameful proclamation against him. He 



NAPOLEON'S MARSHALS 79 

did this in the vain hope of saving the crown which Napo- 
leon had bestowed on him from the general wreck; but 
by this double dealing, he lost both his kingdom and his 
life. If he had been present at Montmirail with his thirty 
thousand Italians, there would have been a favorable 
chance of capturing the whole Prussian army. All that 
Napoleon needed in 1814 was fifty thousand additional 
troops to have given the allies a complete overthrow. 

Murat was not killed by the hand of a peasant, as Byron 
has it in his verses, but in compliance to a royal mandate. 
Such false reports were freely circulated under the Restora- 
tion. 

Bessieres is but slightly known to fame, but he was a 
worthy successor to Murat, and as a cavalry oflScer, fully 
equal to Bliicher. 

On the first day at Essling, Lannes sent him an order to 
charge, and to charge home. Bessieres replied to the 
aide-de-camp, "Tell the Marshal that I always charge 
home;" and so he did. During the battle of Wagram, a 
cannon-ball shattered the pistol which he held in his hand, 
and then ran down his leg, without, however, doing him any 
serious injury. Thiers says that he was killed at Boro- 
dino, but this is a mistake. Bessieres returned in safety 
from the Russian campaign to lose his life in a paltry 
skirmish, the following year. 

Soult, according to Savary, distinguished himseK above 
all others at Austerlitz, and he has received commenda- 
tion from German historians for his campaign against 
Wellington in 1813, with a force greatly inferior in number 
to the English. But Napoleon said that he was a much 
better general to plan a battle, than to fight one. 

Bernadotte was not so much of a Judas as Murat, but 
more so than Marmont is supposed to have been. He 



80 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

must have possessed good ability to judge by the com- 
mands with which Napoleon intrusted him, but there 
remains a suspicion of treachery connected with his move- 
ments in the campaign of 1807, and in 1809, when his 
proclamation after the battle of Wagram savored of 
insubordination. He was the only officer in the army 
who considered that he knew more than the Emperor; 
and as for Napoleon's nomination of him for King of 
Sweden, one can plainly call that a mistake. There was 
no necessity for Bernardotte's joining in the crusade 
against France in 1813. It was sacrificing the interests 
of Sweden for the benefit of Russia and Prussia. If he 
had joined Napoleon in 1812, he might have recovered 
Finland, besides helping to break up that pow:erful, semi- 
civilized and dangerous empire. 

Marmont was the best strategist among the marshals 
but was unfortunate in his battles. He out-manoeuvered 
Wellington at Salamanca, so that the latter was obliged, 
either to win a victory or to surrender; but one of the 
first cannon-balls from the English wounded Marmont 
in the shoulder, so that he had to be carried off the field — • 
a piece of unexampled good fortune for his antagonist. 
Napoleon however blamed him for offering battle before 
he had been joined by Soult. At Laon in 1814, after an 
indecisive engagement Marmont was driven from his 
position by a night attack of the Prussians, so that the 
whole army was obliged to retreat. He is spoken of in the 
Century life of Napoleon, as "the traitorous Marmont;" 
but his treachery may have been patriotic enough. After 
the allies had occupied Paris, he may have concluded that 
further resistance would be merely a waste of human life; 
but it was not for Marmont to decide this alone. It is a 
poetic picture that we have of him fighting the battle of 



NAPOLEON'S MARSHALS 81 

Paris against overwhelming odds with his back against 
the wall of the city.* 

Ney was the hero of the retreat from Moscow. He 
won the title of Prince, by his bravery at Borodino, where 
Napoleon lost twenty -eight generals, and the Russians 
their commander, Bagration, with thirty thousand men. 
At the passage of the Beresina, Ney was the last man to 
cross the bridge in the face of the whole Russian army. 
He is said to have had five horses killed under him at 
Waterloo; but he was not an able commander. Napoleon 
would seem to have been suspicious of this, for he did not 
give Ney an independent command, until 1813, and then 
Ney made a bad failure of it. His tragical fate has en- 
deared him to the memory of mankind. Why should he 
have been put to death, rather than Soult, Gerard, and 
others who took part in the Waterloo campaign? The 
Peter C. Ney of South Carolina, about whom there has 
been so much written, would seem to have been a French 
imposter, who assumed that name in order to give himself 
distinction. It is possible that he may have been a Ney 
of some other family; but if the man had been Marshal 
Ney, there would have been nothing to prevent his return 
to France after the Revolution of 1830. We may believe 
that the good-hearted Louis Philippe would have been 
proud to pardon him. 

Marshal Victor is best known by his heroic reply to 
the Emperor after the battle of Montreux. Victor had 
failed to capture a bridge, whose possession by the French 

* • 

would have ruined the Austrian army, which was already 
in retreat. It was a severe trial for Napoleon's nerves, 
for his last hope of success depended upon that bridge; 
and when Victor presented himself at the evening con- 
ference the Emperor said: "Marshal Victor, you may 
*At least, Thiers says so. 



82 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

leave the army." "No," replied Victor, "I will remain 
and shoulder a musket, and die with my old comrades in 
the Guard. " Nevertheless he did not support Napoleon 
in the emergency of the hundred days. 

Berthier was an excellent chief of staff, who carried out 
Napoleon's directions with great exactness, and may have 
made some suggestions of his own, but he was a hero 
worshipper, and a woman worshipper, which is the same 
as saying that he was not much of a hero himself. In- 
stead of following Napoleon on the Waterloo campaign, 
where he was greatly needed, he fled to Germany, and 
after the campaign was over, filled with remorse, he com- 
mitted suicide. Duroc was grand marshal of the palace, 
and a most efficient one. He was killed by a cannon-ball 
in 1813 when he was more than a mile from the enemy. 
There was no one whose loss could have been more deeply 
regretted by the Emperor. Bertrand was his worthy 
successor. He accompanied Napoleon to St. Helena, 
and never left him until he laid him in the grave. 

Three of Napoleon's marshals were killed by cannon- 
balls. Desaix was killed by a bullet at Marengo. Murat 
and Ney were sentenced to be shot by court martial. 
Berthier committed suicide at the time of the Waterloo 
campaign; but Soult, Victor, Macdonald and the rest, 
survived all the battles and political changes of their time, 
and lived to a prosperous old age. Soult was Minister of 
War in the reign of Louis Philippe. 

Napoleon sometimes made use of men of whose character 
he did not approve, simply because he could not find others 
who were suitable. Such were Fouche and Talleyrand. 
The latter would seem to have made a practice of extort- 
ing money from foreign governments upon the pretext of 
serving their interests at court. He began this practice 
during the Directory, with the envoys of the United 



NAPOLEON'S MARSHALS 83 

States, — ^the well-known x, y and z correspondence. 
According to Napoleon he lost most of the money made 
in that way in stock speciilations. He was exactly the 
opposite of Napoleon, of whom Meneval says that the 
expression of his face changed with every word he spoke; 
that is, he acted out the thought of the moment, — and 
there could be no better proof of his deeply rooted sincerity. 
When he had anything to conceal he was absolutely 
impenetrable. Talleyrand, on the contrary never had but 
one expression to his face, much like that of a cat watching 
for mice. It was a strange face he had, to judge from the 
portraits; with neither manliness nor kindliness apparent 
in it. Next to Metternich, who looked like a veritable 
Mephistopheles, Talleyrand was the ablest diplomat of 
his time, but he never had any policy of his own; he suited 
himself to circumstances, and followed the lead of others. 

The trite proverb, "set a thief to catch a thief, " applies 
remarkably well to Fouche. Lie was one of the regicides 
of Louis XVI. Nobody liked him; and he died in exile at 
Trieste. 

Napoleon was a sore trial to his brothers, for he wished 
to give them positions for which they were not qualified 
by nature. He perceived this himseK after the mischief 
was done, but there was no remedy. Lucien was the only 
one of them who possessed the capacity for a public life, 
and he was of essential service to Napoleon in upsetting 
the Directory; but after that time they never could agree. 
Lucien opposed his brother's attempt to separate him 
from his wife in a good manly spirit. 

Napoleon said of Joseph, "He looks like me, but is 
handsomer. His virtues are those of private life, and it 
is for such he was intended." This describes the whole 
man; but Savary gives him credit for inaugurating those 



84 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

salutary reforms in the kingdom of Naples, which were 
afterwards carried out by Murat. 

Louis and Jerome Bonaparte do not appear to have had 
much character of any kind. Metternich speaks of Louis 
in a favorable manner; but he finally ran away from his 
kingdom of Holland, while Jerome commanded a division 
at Waterloo, and did good service there. 

Louis Bonaparte's eldest son was probably poisoned by 
the direction of Metternich, — as Napoleon predicted in 
regard to his own son. The latter, however, could not 
very well have been disposed of tn that manner, and if he 
was led astray by evil companions, he could not have been 
much like his father who went unscathed through the 
orgies of the Revolution. He looked like his father as a 
boy, but not at all after he had grown to manhood. 

In spite of all that Metternich and Alexander could do, 
the Bonapartes finally regained their importance, and 
they first attained to it through the medium of a demo- 
cratic revolution. It were idle to discuss the question of 
Louis Napoleon's legitimacy as a Bonaparte, for if his 
keen-eyed uncle had not considered him so, he would not 
have permitted him to be christened with his own name. 
The great mass of the French people, both educated and 
common believed him to be a genuine Bonaparte, and 
Machiavelli \vould have said that Louis Napoleon's 
enthusiastic Bonapartism was also much in his favor. 
His ambition was certainly not that of a vulgar adven- 
turer. 

His reign was, in certain respects remarkably like that 
of the great Napoleon. The first ten years was a brilliant 
success. He obtained the support of the English tories 
by a favorable commercial treaty. He regulated the 
internal affairs of France as they never had been regulated. 
He made Paris the finest city in the world. He encouraged 



NAPOLEON'S MARSHALS 85 

the arts and sciences by magnificent and fairly judicious 
patronage. French art owes its present ascendency chief- 
ly to the impulse given it by Napoleon III.; and the archi- 
tecture of his time has extended itself to Brussels, Turin, 
Milan and Vienna. He humiliated Russia in the Crimean 
war, and Austria in the Italian campaign. He avenged 
his uncle in the death of the Czar Nicholas the son of the 
first Napoleon's greatest enemy. His Mexican expedition, 
however, shows that he had not learned from previous 
experience to let the Spanish race alone; and according to 
Bismarck he missed a rare opportunity in not taking 
possession of Belgium during the war between Prussia 
and Austria. Belgium naturally forms a portion of 
France, and the union of the two countries would be of 
great advantage to both. Instead of doing this he at- 
tempted to detach Victor Emmanuel from his alliance 
with Prussia by a gross fabrication, which was quickly 
discovered, and which set the whole Italian nation against 
him.* This was the first step towards his downfall. Too 
much good was said of him in England, and too much evil 
in America, especially by the New York Tribune. To 
quote Bismarck again, "He never forgot a man who had 
done him a service, " but on the whole his was not such a 
character as one can cordially admire. His usurpation of 
the government had not the excuse of public necessity 
like that of the great Napoleon; although it was largely 
approved by the French people. Many of Napoleon's 
old soldiers and officers like Gourgand, lived to witness the 
restoration of the Bonapartes, and one cannot help sym- 
pathizing with them. 

On the whole, France did not come off so badly from the 
Napoleonic wars. The French won more than fifty vic- 
tories; their opponents less than twenty; they had the 
*See my life of Bismarck. 



86 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

satisfaction of knowing that it required all the other 
nations of Europe to put them down; which was much 
glory for them, and little enough for their enemies. They 
were almost free from debt, while the English National 
debt amounted to nearly three hundred millions sterling; 
and the rebuilding of Moscow, alone, must have cost 
several hundred millions of dollars. They retained the 
boundaries of 1789, and the loss of life was quickly repaired 
by nature's kindly method; for in a crowded country like 
France, every man that dies makes room for another to be 
born. In 1811 nearly one-fourth of the population of 
Great Britain were paupers, and had to be supported by 
government. This shows how closely the plans of Napo- 
leon missed success; but he remained twelve days too long 
at Moscow. 



THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN 

HUNDREDS of writers have treated this sub- 
ject heretofore, and yet something always 
remains to be said of it. It still continues 
fresh and interesting. If nothing more, I can 
at least expose some of the errors and misstatements of my 
predecessors. This is not an enviable task, but it is a 
useful one. 

The Waterloo campaign is the most interesting one of 
modern times, for its problematic character, the fearful 
loss of life occasioned by it, and a certain dramatic quality, 
like the fifth act of a tragedy, which reached its climax in 
the consignment of Napoleon to St. Helena. 

The political importance of the campaign has often 
been estimated too highly. It was the battle of Leipsic 
in 1813 that broke the power of Napoleon; and after that 
he had nothing more than a ghost of a chance so long as 
Austria, Prussia, and Russia remained united against him. 
That they would have remained so is proved by the fact 
that their alliance continued for more than thirty years 
longer without any other object apparently than to pre- 
serve the peace and prevent democratic revolutions. 
Those who, like Byron, look upon Napoleon as a homicide 
and butcher of mankind cannot be aware that after his 
return from Elba he offered the allies peace during his own 
and son's lifetime, and that they were even disposed to 
consider these terms. Nothing but the terror of Napo- 
leon's genius can excuse the great powers for declining his 

87 



88 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

proposals; and it seems a shame that the man who proved 
himseK foremost in the art of war should not have been 
permitted to show what he could also do in the arts of 
peace. But it is only on grand occasions that history ac- 
complishes the best results ; and the lives of forty thousand 
men were sacrificed within three days, in order to main- 
tain the principle of hereditary right in politics. 

No one knew better than Napoleon the desperate errand 
on which he went'. Even if he had succeeded in driving 
Wellington into the sea and pushing Bliicher across the 
Rhine, there was little chance that he could sustain him- 
self against the forces that would afterward have been 
brought against him. Only a continuation of miraculous 
successes could have saved him, and his fate was prac- 
tically decided before the battle of Waterloo was half 
finished. 

It has been said that his army in this campaign was 
one of the best he ever commanded; but this is hardly a 
fair statement. The rank and file of his troops was largely 
composed of veterans, but his best generals, with the ex- 
ception of Ney and Soult, were gone. Massena was an 
invalid, Junot and Lannes were dead, Murat was in Italy, 
and Victor declined to serve. Dr. Ropes thinks Napoleon 
made a mistake in stationing Davout at Paris, but it was 
essential to have a reliable man in command at the seat of 
government, and we should be cautious in judging such 
matters in the light of subsequent events. To have re- 
placed Grouchy with Massena and D'Erlon with Victor 
might have made a great difference in the result of the 
campaign. In addition to this, an American student 
who was residing in Paris during the hundred days, and 
in his old age wrote an account of it for "The Atlantic 
Monthly, " noticed that the French cavalry were not well 
mounted. This followed as a matter of course from the 



THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN 89 

immense destruction of horses during the retreat from 
Moscow, and gave the Enghsh cavalry, charging down 
the slope of Mont St. Jean, an easy superiority. 

The Duke of Wellington was of opinion that Napoleon 
would have succeeded better if he had invaded Belgium 
by other lines than those of the Meuse and Sambre; and 
he certainly could not have succeeded worse unless he and 
his whole army had been captured. If it does not appear 
that his chances might have been much improved by 
pursuing a different course, if he had followed the line of 
the Scheldt and attacked Wellington on the extreme right, 
he might have cut the English from their base of supplies, 
but at the same time would have been outflanked strate- 
gically by Bliicher, a general who would not have been 
slow to take advantage of the situation. If, on the con- 
trary, Napoleon had marched against Bliicher's left wing, 
he would thus have thrown the allies together, and have 
been obliged to fight very much such a battle as General 
Beauregard did at Shiloh. Prince Bliicher's biographer 
blamed Wellington for declining to prearrange a point of 
junction in case of Napoleon's advance; and Wellington 
replied to this that such an attempt would probably have 
led to a false position, than which nothing could be more 
unfortunate for the allied cause. It would be interesting 
to hear this question discussed by an impartial expert in 
military affairs. 

A statement by Napoleon's surgeon at St. Helena may 
have misled some writers in regard to his plan of this 
campaign. He is reported to have said that if his subordi- 
nates had acted with as much energy as they did some- 
times, Wellington's army would have been captured in 
cantonments before he had a chance to strike a blow. 
This, however, throws more light on Napoleon's manner 
of talking than on the subject before us. Napoleon no 



90 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

doubt felt pretty sore over this defeat. For Marshal Ney, 
with forty thousand men, to capture the Duke of Welling- 
ton with twice that number of troops at his disposal, was 
such a dream as no sane person would imagine. 

Napoleon's plan was one which he had invented himself 
in his first Italian campaign. It was very well known, 
and Bliicher evidently expected from first to last that 
Napoleon would act exactly as he did. Wellington, on 
the other hand, seems to have looked for some new inven- 
tion. 

Napoleon directed his first attack against Bliicher, 
because the Prussian army was stationed nearer to the 
French frontier than Wellington's, and because he knew 
that Bliicher was always ready for a fight. He directed 
Ney to press forward on the road to Brussels and hold 
Wellington in check, while he dealt with Bliicher himself. 
Having defeated Bliicher, he would transfer the bulk of his 
army to unite with Ney and fight Wellington. 

Marshal Ney performed his part of the programme in 
a satisfactory manner. It is thought that if he had at- 
tacked Wellington at once at Quatre Bras he might have 
defeated him; but what could Ney have gained by this? 
If he had defeated the small force opposed to him and 
pursued it, he would have run the risk of being overpowered 
by a superior force coming to its support, while he would 
be widening the distance between himseK and his own 
reinforcements. That the whole body of Ney's troops 
was not present at the battle was owing to a request which 
Napoleon sent to him for assistance, which was delivered 
to one of his subordinates. Wellington remained on the 
defensive until the close of the day, when, having been 
heavily reinforced, he ordered a forward movement, and 
Ney's army retired from the field in good order. Welling- 



THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN 91 

ton, with a force numerically superior to his adversary, 
gained no advantage except the possession of the ground. 

Meanwhile, "Old Forwards" was carrying on with 
Napoleon one of the toughest struggles of the times. 
General Hambley avers that Napoleon directed his first 
attack against Blticher because the French were accus- 
tomed to defeating the Prussians. Such an opinion by a 
writer on military affairs! The plain fact is that the 
French have never defeated the Prussians except when 
commanded by Napoleon, and at Davout's battle at 
Auerstadt. Bliicher defeated them repeatedly in 1813, 
and in 1814 he defeated Napoleon himself at Laon, though 
it is true with some advantages on his side. 

The Prussian army consisted of soldiers of two years' 
service, and only three years' training. Bliicher's cavalry 
may have been superior to Napoleon's, but he had no body 
of trained veterans like the Old Guard or Wellington's 
Highlanders. He was obliged to concentrate at or near 
Ligny on the best ground he could find, and the position 
was not a strong one. Otherwise he must have retreated 
on the road to Liege and have been hopelessly separated 
from Wellington. Bliicher's Prussian biographer com- 
plained that Wellington did not come to the assistance of 
the Prussians, but it is doubtful if Bliicher ever complained 
of it. His army was larger than any force that Napoleon 
would be able to bring against him, and why should he 
require assistance?* 

The battle of Ligny in its general character resembled 
Wagram. Bliicher, like the Archduke Charles, attempted 
to turn Napoleon's left wing; but at the very moment when 



*Tlie story that Wellington examined Bliicher's ground and disap- 
proved of it, contradicts itself, for it represents Wellington speaking as 
if he had seen Blucher's army in position, which it was quite impossible 
for him to have done. 



92 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

he seemed likely to succeed, Napoleon, by a sudden attack 
of the Guards, captured the village of Ligny and compelled 
him to retreat. Gustavus Adolphus gained the battle of 
Britenfeld by similar tactics. If Blucher had merely stood 
on the defensive, which it was all that was necessary to 
do to block Napoleon's game, this might not have hap- 
pened. Every nation has its style in war; and there are 
no soldiers like the French for fighting in a street or storm- 
ing a fortified position. Blucher does not appear to have 
realized this. He charged at the captured position at the 
head of his cavalry, but his horse was killed by the frag- 
ment of a bombshell and the attack was repulsed. The 
Prussians retreated in good order, and Napoleon appears 
to have captured few guns and not many prisoners except 
those who were wounded. The loss of the French was 
about twelve thousand killed and wounded; that of the 
Prussians from twelve to fifteen thousand.* 

An incident occurred during this battle which proves 
how narrow the line often is between success and failure. 
Napoleon sent a request to Marshal Ney for a body of 
eight or ten thousand men (if he could possibly spare them) 
to attack the Prussians on the right wing. If this request 
could have been complied with, Ligny would have been a 
Waterloo for Blucher; a large portion of his left wing must 
inevitably have been captured and his army compelled to 
evacuate Belgium altogether. The request was delivered 
to a general of division who was on the road to Quatre 
Bras, and who undertook to fulfill it on his own responsi- 
bility. He and his forces were already within sight of the 
Prussians when the contrary order reached him to retrace 

*Dr. Ropes places the Prussian loss on French authority at eighteen 
or twenty thousand. German writers are much more trustworthy on 
such points, however, than the French: witness the report of the Prussian 
staff for the war of 1870 and 1871. 



THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN 93 

his step^s. Marshal d'Erlon is credited with having pre- 
vented this stroke of genius, which otherwise might have 
changed the current of French history. 

The next forenoon Grouchy was sent in pursuit of the 
Prussians with about thirty thousand men. According 
to Thiers, Grouchy was a poHtical appointment, — ^the 
sort that has often occasioned mischief in mihtary affairs. 
He belonged to the old noblesse whom Napoleon was desir- 
ous to conciliate; was a brave soldier and formerly com- 
manded the Old Guard. Napoleon, however, was obliged 
to choose between Grouchy, Vandamme, and Gerard. 
The position was one of great delicacy and required a 
skillful and experienced general. In 1809, after the battle 
of Eckmuhl, Napoleon dispatched Massena in pursuit of 
the Austrians, while he himself took the road to Vienna. 

Grouchy did not at all like the commission that was 
given him. He was no doubt very much afraid of Blucher 
and with good reason. Blucher had an available force of 
forty thousand more than he himself commanded, and 
his own troops had suffered but little less than the Prussians 
on the preceding day. What was there to prevent Blucher 
from turning on him and overpowering him; Blucher was 
originally a cavalry general, and possessed all the dash 
and rapidity of action which belongs to that branch of 
the service. The fact that on the afternoon of June 18 
Grouchy was obliged to fight a battle with General Teile- 
mann shows that if Blucher had not gone to Wellington's 
assistance Grouchy would have been obliged at that time 
to encoimter the whole Prussian force; and the destruction 
of Grouchy's command would have been almost as severe 
a blow to Napoleon as Waterloo itself. 

In the vindication of his conduct, which he published 
on his return from exile, Marshal Grouchy says of his last 
interview with the Emperor: — 



94 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

I replied to him, that the Prussians had commenced 
their retreat at ten o'clock the evening before; that much 
time must elapse before my troops, who were scattered 
over the plain, were cleaning their guns and making their 
soup, and were not expecting to be called upon to march 
that day, could be put in movement; that the enemy had 
seventeen or eighteen hours' start of the troops sent in 
pursuit; that although the reports of the cavalry gave no 
definite information as to the direction of the retreat of 
the mass of the Prussian army, it was apparently on Na- 
mur that they were retiring; and that thus, in following 
them, I should find myself isolated, separated from him, 
and out of range of his movements. 

"These observations," Marshal Grouchy states, "were 
not well received; the emperor repeated his orders, adding 
that it was for me to discover the route taken by Marshal 
Bliicher."* 

Grouchy's objections are valid enough, but unfortunate- 
ly there was nothing else to be done. The wonder is that 
Napoleon, finding that Grouchy did not like the business, 
should not have superseded him at once. Vandamme was 
an experienced officer, and might have understood the 
situation better. Soult in such an undertaking might 
have won great renown, but Napoleon retained Soult not 
only for his knowledge of Wellington's tactics, but as the 
best person to take command of the army in case of acci- 
dent to himself. 

At Gembloux, seven or eight miles from Ligny, the 
highway divides going north and east. Grouchy ap- 
parently spent the 17th of June in discovering which 
direction Blucher had taken. Now any one who examines 
the positions of the four armies on the morning of June 18 
will perceive that Napoleon was in a trap. Blucher was 

*The Campaign at Waterloo, J. C. Ropes, p. 207. 



THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN 95 

at Wavre, which is about fourteen miles from the field of 
Waterloo; whereas Grouchy was fully eighteen miles from 
Wavre, and twenty miles distant from Napoleon, who 
probably delayed opening the battle on that account. 

At half past eleven Grouchy had reached Walheim, 
only six miles north of Gembloux, where he was greeted 
with the sound of Napoleon's cannon at Mont St. Jean, 
and as is well known was urged by Vandamme and Gerard 
to go to his support. If Grouchy did not know where he 
was and what he was doing, this was clearly his best line 
of action, though Bliicher still had the inside track and 
could have reached the field of battle nearly an hour before 
Grouchy could. Yet in this case we ought to consider 
not only what actually happened but what might have 
happened. If Wellington's army had been defeated by 
three o'clock in the afternoon, Grouchy 's assistance would 
not have been required, and he would have found himself 
awkwardly situated with regard to Bliicher. He would 
seem to have been more culpable for the slowness of his 
movements than for erroneous judgment. Why Bliicher 
delayed so long to reinforce Wellington has not yet been 
explained. One Prussian army corps arrived on the field 
about five p. m., and seriously embarrassed Napoleon's 
movements; but it was more than two hours later when 
the main force of the Prussians attacked the right wing 
of the French army. 

The material of Wellington's force was not nearly so 
good as Bliicher's. Only two-fifths of the troops drawn 
up to oppose Napoleon at Mont St. Jean were British 
soldiers, of which nearly a third were volunteers; one-fifth 
was made up of Hanoverians and Brunswick Prussians; 
and the remainder were Dutch and Belgians.* Welling- 

*Tliis is General Hambley; but Mr. J. C. Ropes says about twenty- 
four thousand British, twenty thousand Germans, and twenty-three 



96 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

ton's Highlanders, however, may be counted equal to 
Napoleon's Old Guard, and he had also a very effective 
cavalry force. Napoleon, of course, was aware of the 
constitution of his opponent's army and probably expected 
to defeat it quite easily. 

The emperor alleges in his memoirs that he sent an order 
to Grouchy on the evening of the seventeenth requesting 
him to come to his assistance on the following day if he 
could possibly do so without Bliicher's knowing it. The 
truth of this has been doubted, and Grouchy has denied 
ever receiving such a dispatch. It is possible that Napo- 
leon intended to send such an order, that he neglected to 
send it, and afterwards supposed that he had sent it; but 
it is quite as possible that being sent to Wavre it fell into 
the hands of the Prussians, or that Grouchy being at 
Gembloux, Napoleon's orderly did not succeed in finding 
him until late in the following afternoon. Thiers states 
that a Polish ofiicer was intrusted with this dispatch, and 
that he never afterwards was heard from. 

Marshal Marmont, in his report on the battle of Sala- 
manca, notices that Wellington had a faculty for selecting 
strong positions, and his position at Mont St. Jean was 
no doubt the strongest he ever occupied.* The farm of 
Hougomont and the village of La Haye Sainte were like 
two castles in front of his line, which protected it from 
any immediate attack on the right and centre, while his 
second line was posted in comparative security behind the 
crest of the ridge. Yet Wellington did not anticipate 
Napoleon's attack on his left wing, and stationed his 
weakest troops there. 

thousand Dutch and Belgian troops. English battles have always been 
fought largely by soldiers of other nations. 

*It was at Mont St. Jean the battle took place. Waterloo is more 
than a mile on the road to Brussels. 



THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN 97 

He thus came very near being defeated at the outset. 
According to the statement of his biographer. Rev. George 
Robert Gleig, the Dutch and Belgian troops all ran away, 
leaving only three or four thousand English soldiers to 
contend with a column of twelve or fifteen thousand 
French. General Pictou, who was in command, gave the 
order to advance, and was instantly killed by a musket 
ball. If this had happened before the order was given, it 
seems likely that in the confusion that ensues at the death 
of a commanding officer, the French attack would have 
succeeded. 

Marshal d'Erlon has been censured by all Napoleon's 
sympathizers for the formation of the column with which 
he made this attack. There can be no doubt that it was 
not properly supported by cavalry; but why did not 
Napoleon superintend such an important movement him- 
self .f* A Prussian corjps d'armee had already been observed 
on the heights of St. Lambert before the order for attack 
was given. Napoleon ought to have realized the deadly 
peril in which he and his army were placed. If Junot or 
Victor had organized the movement, who can doubt but 
that it would have succeeded? Why did not Napoleon 
support it with Kellermann's cavalry division and six or 
seven battalions of the middle guard? He might have 
concentrated tv/o-fifths of his force on that single point 
without danger to the rest of his hne, or if he had ad- 
vanced his right wing in line for a determined conflict, 
who can doubt that numbers and discipline combined 
would have carried the day? 

Napoleon's capture of La Haye Sainte two hours later 
was a decided advantage, and gave him a second oppor- 
tunity to win the battle. This, however, was neutralized 
by the attack of the Prussian corps shortly afterward on 
the right flank of the French. From this time forward 



98 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

Wellington had the advantage of numbers, and Napoleon's 
army was in such a position that nothing but the blunders 
of his opponents could save it from defeat. Napoleon was 
obliged to withdraw troops from his centre to protect his 
right wing, and thus weakened it too much for a vigorous 
offensive movement. There were now more German than 
English troops on the battlefield. 

The failure of Ney's cavalry charges points directly to 
the statements already made in regard to the weakness 
of Napoleon's cavalry. Not a single square of the enemy 
was broken by them, whereas in 1870 the Berlin Guards 
rode down the French ranks at Gravelotte in spite of the 
rapid firing of the infantry. The Dutch regiments on 
Wellington's centre suffered most severely, but succeeded 
in preserving their formation. 

Dr. Ropes is the first writer in English who has given a 
clear and satisfactory account of the close of the battle. 
According to Thiers, the Guards made their attack in 
column about the time of the arrival of Bliicher, when 
the French line broke behind them and they were left at 
the mercy of Wellington's cannon, and refusing to surren- 
der were immolated on the field. This is melodramatic 
enough, but in order to believe it we must suppose that 
Napoleon delayed a final attack until the Prussian regi- 
ments had begun to deploy on his right; which is the 
same as supposing that Napoleon had suddenly lost his 
senses. 

Dr. Ropes 's account is supported by the statement of 
a Captain Powell, who fought against Napoleon's Guard in 
the Highlanders. It was not the Old Guard but the 
Middle Guard which was defeated, and Captain Powell 
attributes it to the sudden apparition of the Highlanders 
(who had been lying on the ground) and the deadly volley 
that they poured into the advancing column. This unex- 



THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN 99 

pected collision was caused by the volume of smoke which 
rolled between the two armies, and as the Highlanders, had 
orders to fire while the Guard had orders to reserve their 
fire, the latter were taken at a disadvantage from which 
they did not recover. 

Captain Powell's testimony is valuable here. He states 
that the Highlanders pursued the Middle Guard for nearly 
a quarter of a mile, until finding themselves outflanked 
by the advance of Napoleon's Old Guard they retired 
again to their former position. 

The Old Guard was itself outflanked in turn by a British 
division coming up from Hougomont, and finding itself 
caught in a trap wisely withdrew without serious loss. 

Wellington's cavalry charge, by which he had recovered 
La Haye Sainte, appears to have been contemporary with 
Bliicher's attack on the French right. 

I believe no authentic statement of the English loss at 
Waterloo has ever been made public. Thiers places 
Napoleon's loss at about thirty thousand killed and wound- 
ed; the English at about the same; and the Prussians at 
eight or ten thousand. This is nothing but national 
vanity. The British loss is generally admitted to have 
been over twenty thousand, but that it should be equal 
to that of the French in such a conflict is incredible. The 
Prussian loss may have been between three and five thou- 
sand, but certainly not more. 

Wellington's management of the battle after Napoleon's 
first attack has never been found fault with. His subordi- 
nates also were everywhere equal to the occasion. As a 
defensive action, however, it was not so remarkable as 
Napoleon's second day at Leipsic, when with an army 
composed largely of French boys he preserved an unbroken 
line against a force nearly twice as large as his own. 

What Napoleon evidently did not reckon on in this 



100 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

campaign was the strategy of Bliicher. He supposed 
after the battle of Ligny that Blticher would retreat on 
Namur or Liege, and he misled Grouchy somewhat by 
suggesting this. If he had foreseen Bliicher's action, he 
would certainly have taken greater precautions against it. 
We could admire Wellington more perfectly if he had 
never pointed to the playground at Eton and said, "There 
Waterloo was won." Napoleon would not have plumed 
himself on such a victory. He does not appear to have 
plumed himself on any of his exploits. The fame of forty 
victories was no comfort to him at St. Helena. The man 
was too great for that. 



THE POLITICS OF THE DIVINA COM MEDIA 

WE are not accustomed to think of T. W. 
Parsons as one of the foremost American 
poets, and yet in his translation from 
Dante, he has done the world a literary 
service second to none of them. There have been many 
translations hitherto of the great Italian epic, in English 
prose and verse, but Parsons's is the only one that combines 
the essential qualities of the original; its ease and grace 
of movement, its earnest tone and delicacy of expression . 
Before reading Parsons's translation I had given up hope 
of enjoying any translation of Dante, except, perhaps, 
John Carlyle's prose-poetic version of the Inferno. Carey 
made the fatal mistake of attempting to render him into 
English blank verse ; and Longfellow had already acquired 
a style too far removed from that of the Divina Commedia. 
The lack of any very definite style as a poet may have 
been to Mr. Parsons's advantage as a translator. 

No other modern language possesses equal advantages 
with the Italian for the formation of smooth-flowing verse; 
and the secret of Dante's graceful measure resides chiefly 
in the cadence of his feminine rhymes, which fall over 
from one line to another like the spray of a fountain. 
This effect might have been reproduced in Spenser's time, 
but doubtfully, in the present contracted state of the Eng- 
lish language. Parsons very wisely did not attempt to 
reproduce it, — though he has done so in places under 
favorable conditions; but he has preserved the alternate 

101 



102 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

rhymes of Dante's verse, which continue without a break 
to the end of each canto. He has thus secured a sense 
of movement, which, if it does not possess the noiseless 
ghding of Dante's spirits, nevertheless carries the reader 
along in a pleasant and unconstrained manner. In this 
we recognize its advantage over English blank verse, which 
is much better suited to the argument of the stage. Al- 
though Parsons's lines are commonly a syllable shorter 
than Dante's, he has rendered the first thirty-five verses 
of the Inferno into twenty -eight English verses. 

Considering the diflSculty of the work, the translation 
is remarkably smooth and well sustained. That it should 
be always equal to itself is more than we have the right to 
expect. Parsons's account of the revenge of Ugolino is one 
of his most fortunate passages, while he has treated the 
pure and simple story of Francesca's love with a circum- 
locution that requires too much for the imagination. 
That the Purgaiorio remains unfinished is more to be re- 
gretted than that Parsons should not have attempted 
more than a few detached passages of the Paradiso. In 
his exile Dante was no longer equal to a description of true 
happiness. 

This rare book, however, needs to be published with 
explanatory notes. Dante appears to have had glimpses 
of his own literary immortality, and yet no other poet 
has written so distinctly and determinedly for his own 
time and people. He is perhaps so much the better for 
this; but whether he is a better poet for his extensive 
scholarship may be considered doubtful. What the true 
poet needs, is not scholarship but a manifold experience, 
and it must be admitted that the scholarly character of 
Dante's work makes it more difficult for us to com- 
prehend. 

To realize the full meaning and intention of the Divina 



POLITICS OF THE DIVINA COMMEDIA 103 

Commedia, it is necessary to acquire some familiarity with 
the tenets of mediaeval Christianity, to possess a college 
graduate's knowledge of Greek mythology, and to be ac- 
quainted with the course of Italian politics during the 
thirteenth century. There is as little true philosophy in 
his epic as in Homer's Iliad. It indicates an author of 
wide observation and profound experience, but the scholas- 
tic metaphysics with which he has impeded the movement 
of his Purgatorio and Paradiso may well be left to the 
initiated. Dante was not a thinker like Abelard, but a 
poet par excellence. 

Of these requisites the last has been the least understood, 
even by Dante's most ardent admirers. His interference 
in politics has been looked upon as the great mistake of 
his life. It has been said that he placed his enemies in 
hell and his friends in purgatory. It has been looked upon 
as a natural piece of vindictiveness that he should have 
placed his arch-enemy, Boniface VIII., in the third circle 
of Malebolge. 

Without entering too far into this branch of the sub- 
ject, we may quote the following sentence from one of 
the latest of his commentators: — 

"It is, however, not easy to decide what the principle 
is upon which he made his selection: some have thought 
that it was personal, and that he allowed himself to 
be guided throughout by motives of personal liking or 
hatred."* 

Suspicion is the child of ignorance and bad judgment. 
Sound minds recognize one another; and if there had not 
been a deep abiding sense of justice in Dante, he would 
never have become a world poet. All human beings are 
swayed more or less by personal feeling, but a close ex- 
amination of Dante's judgments proves that he was neither 
*Scartazzmi's Companion to Dante, trans, p. 429. 



104 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

partial to his friends, nor unfairly invidious to his enemies 
and political opponents. The principle he evidently acted 
upon was that a person who had committed one cardinal 
sin, like the simony of Clement V. or Jason's desertion of 
Hypsipyle, ought to be condemned to hell, no matter how 
virtuous he might be otherwise. He has placed a number 
of Ghibelines in the Inferno, with his instructor Brunetto 
Latini and his friend Jacopo Rusticucci. Manfred is 
placed in purgatory, to show that in spite of excommuni- 
cation he is on the way to paradise. 

Guelph and Ghibeline are still ominous words. They 
represent the struggle between church and state in the 
middle ages, which raged so fiercely in Germany and Italy 
that other European nations were comparatively neg- 
lected by the priesthood; and the reason for this was that 
it was a struggle also for national independence against 
national unity. Italy could have no central authority of 
its own, so long as the pope held possession of Rome. He 
could not be pope and king also; and this fact created 
a demand for some supreme authority from the outside, 
which might constitute a final court of appeal for the diflfi- 
culties arising between the different states; and although 
the papal government disliked this, it was considered pref- 
erable to an Italian monarchy. The pope and the emperor 
were like a married couple who can neither live together 
nor live apart. 

A nation without a central government can only main- 
tain its independence so long as external circumstances 
favor this. Pope Adrian I. was obliged to call in Charle- 
magne to protect him against the Lombards; and John 
XII. offered the imperial dignity to Otho I. on condition 
that he would depose the usurper Berengarius. The 
attacks of the Saracens on southern Italy, which once 
placed Rome itself in serious danger, were a perpetual 



POLITICS OF THE DIVINA COMMEDIA 105 

annoyance, and both Germans and Normans were called 
upon to suppress them. The Italian people were perfectly 
capable of defending themselves, but they lacked military 
organization, and it was not for the interest of the papal 
government that they should acquire this; and the grati- 
tude of the popes to their deliverers gradually cooled after 
the danger was over. 

The terms Guelph and Ghibeline only originated when 
the masterly Waiblingen family came to the German 
throne, but the same parties existed before their time and 
long afterward. The Guelphs were the patriotic party 
who wished Italy to become independent; and the Ghibe- 
lines were the party of law and order, who preferred pay- 
ing a foreign tax to having continual rows with their 
neighbors. As a matter of course the large cities like 
Milan, Genoa, Florence, and Bologna were Guelphic; and 
the smaller states, such as Verona, Padua, Arezzo, Cre- 
mona, and Pisa, who were greatly afraid of their more 
powerful neighbors, were Ghibeline. Naturally, in the 
more powerful cities the opposition was Ghibeline, and in 
the smaller ones it was Guelph. In Florence the Neri were 
Guelph and the Bianchi Ghibeline, or allied with them. 
In Florence the Ghibeline party acquired the ascendency 
in 1260; for which event one of its streets was named the 
Via Ghiabellina. 

There is always a conflict external or internal in the 
nation, the city, or the individual; but the manner in 
which we conduct ourselves in the struggle is more im- 
portant than the object or occasion of it. The occasion is 
a variable, but our conduct is a function of our lives. 
There was much useless bloodshed in the Guelph and 
Ghibeline wars, as there was in other countries during the 
middle ages, but in spite of this Italy prospered, improved, 
and became wealthy. There were varying successors on 



106 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

both sides ; but the three powerful Hohenstaufen monarchs, 
Frederick I., Henry VI., and Frederick II., coming in suc- 
cession gave a preponderating advantage to the Ghibeline 
cause, and reduced the temporal authority of the pope 
almost to a nutshell. 

This was particularly the case during the reign of Fred- 
erick II., a ruler who united in himself the talents of 
Louis XIV. and Frederick the Great, without the weak- 
nesses of either, — one of the most complete men of whom 
there is any record. At the age of eighteen he crossed 
the Alps in disguise (for the Swiss were hostile to him) in 
order to take possession of an empire which not only in- 
cluded modern Germany, but Austria proper, Bohemia, 
the Netherlands, Switzerland, Lombardy, and the king- 
dom of Naples. For thirty-eight years he governed this 
vast domain as if by magic. He was terrible in war, but 
too wise to attempt conquests which he did not believe 
could be retained. He carried the sword in his left hand 
and the olive-branch in his right. He suppressed a rebel- 
lion of the Lombards with Napoleon-like rapidity and 
thoroughness; but when obliged to go on a crusade in order 
to nullify the excommunication of the pope, he made 
peace with Carmel the Great, the successor of Saladin, 
and obtained from him larger concessions for the city of 
Jerusalem than previous crusaders had won by hard fight- 
ing. He founded a university, chartered free cities, and 
enacted laws to ameliorate the condition of the peasantry. 
Dr. Francis Lieber speaks of him as a man centuries in 
advance of his own age; and Menzel says that the" lustre 
of his seven crowns was far surpassed by his intellectual 
gifts and graces. " 

Against such a sovereign the pope had no weapons, 
spiritual or temporal, that were of any avail, — Frederick's 
son once captured the whole college of cardinals on their 



POLITICS OF THE DIVINA COMMEDIA 107 

way from Avignon to Rome, — so the conclave of the Vati- 
can came to the wicked determination to assassinate the 
whole Hohenstaufen family.* Frederick's favorite son 
Enzio, was captured by the Guelphs at Bologna and put 
to death contrary to knightly customs and the right of bel- 
ligerents. Frederick himself narrowly escaped poisoning, 
and died soon afterward in his fifty-seventh year. His 
son Conrad IV., and Conrad's brother Henry, were both 
poisoned by the priests. His last son, Manfred, was killed 
in battle, fighting against the Duke of Anjou, whom the 
pope had called into Italy for the purpose, f His beauti- 
ful wife died in prison, and his young children, brought 
up in ignorance, became beggars in the streets. Three 
years later Conrad V., who came to avenge Manfred's 
death, was beheaded at Naples. So ended the Hohen- 
staufens; and in the history of the Church of Rome there 
is not a more hideous crime. 

When base methods are resorted to it commonly indi- 
cates a desperate condition of affairs. After the destruc- 
tion of the noble Waiblingen family, the pope and his 
cardinals found they had only changed a German for a 
French master; for the evil was inherent in the political 
situation. The execution of Conrad was avenged, as 
Carlyle says, by "Sicilian Vespers," in which the French 
were massacred, not only to a man, but to a woman. 
Pope Celestine was "induced to resign," by Charles of 
Anjou; and his successor, the infamous Boniface, was so 
maltreated by Philip the Fair that he died in the fourth 
year of Dante's exile. Such a course of events could only 
serve to strengthen the Ghibelines in Italy. Many im- 



*We regret to find a strict moralist like John Stuart Mill defending 
this course on the groimd of necessity. The same reasoning would 
exculpate the murderers of Cavendish and Burke. 

fin 1265, the same year that Dante was bom. 



108 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

portant Guelphs went over to them from the fear of a 
sacerdotal despotism, and among these was the poet Dante. 
The succeeding pope, Clement V., favored the Ghibelines. 

Such was the background upon which the Divina Corn- 
media was written. In his youth, Dante was a soldier, 
and had fought against the Ghibelines at Campaldino. 
He next became a politician, but his poetic sense of justice 
and devoted patriotism brought him into conflict with 
greater forces than those which he could wield. If it had 
not been for his exile we might never have read his poetry. 

It must be confessed that his scheme of morals is rather 
academic. According to modern standards, it would have 
been more just to have represented Frederick II. in pur- 
gatory, and Boniface VIII. in the lowest hell; for in cold- 
blooded villainy Boniface was never surpassed by any 
other pope, unless it were Alexander Borgia. We find 
Frederick assigned to the circle of arch-heretics — which 
was simply taking his enemies' accusations for truth. It 
is evident that he was excommunicated for purely political 
reasons, and that his severe edicts against heresy were 
intended to counteract this. Dante may have known 
less about him than the historian Hallam did. The real 
heretic is he who refuses to believe the truth when it is placed 
before his eyes; and Frederick was too enlightened to feel 
implicit faith in the superstitious dogmas of his time. 

Why Dante should have placed his friends, Teghiaio 
Aldobrandi and Jacopo Rusticucci, in the Inferno is not 
so clear; it was probably for reasons known only to con- 
temporaries : so also of his preceptor Brunetto, — ^but they 
were evidently excellent men or Dante would not have 
foimd pleasure in recognizing them. 

A still more pedantic instance of injustice is that of 
Pietro della Vigne, in canto xiii, 55, who is incarcerated 
in the trunk of a tree for having committed suicide. He 



POLITICS OF THE DIVINA COMMEDIA 109 

had been minister of state to Frederick II., but was blinded 
and imprisoned on suspicion of having attempted to 
poison his master. Dante considered him innocent of 
this accusation, but nevertheless consigned him to hell 
for taking his own life in prison. Contrariwise he excul- 
pates Cato, who was the most pedantic of suicides. 

Dante's essay in praise of monarchy is readily explained. 
He recognized the need of a national government for Italy, 
and monarchy was the only form of centralization that 
he could understand. The time for federalism had not 
yet arrived. 

He was not the greatest of poets. He may have ex- 
celled Milton; but he is surpassed by Homer, Shakespeare, 
and Goethe, — perhaps also by Sophocles and ^Eschylus. 
Yet, we return to him continually, and we are not depressed 
by the terrible scenes which he conjures up for us; for 
they appear in an atmosphere of the tenderest pity, and 
the light which illumines them comes from the life eternal. 
The Divina Commedia is one of the watch-towers which 
mark the progress of civilization, and, like Homer's Iliad, 
it may still hold its place after the lingua Toscana has 
ceased to be spoken. 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 

MACHIAVELLI is one of the puzzles of me- 
diaeval history. When some notable person 
who has always appeared immaculate to the 
public eye, one who has been long distin- 
guished for the performance of pious works and the utter- 
ance of patriotic sentiments, is discovered conniving at 
fraud, or caught in the perpetration of some criminal act 
himself, we are greatly shocked, it is true, but not alto- 
gether surprised; for we know that such instances have 
not been uncommon before, that self-interest is an ever 
ready instructor of hypocrisy, and, if we are sufficiently 
honest with ourselves, we realize how near at times the 
tempter has been to each one of us. When, however, we 
read of a man upon whose personal character there was 
never a stain, and who devoted his life to the service of his 
native city, who endured torture without complaint, and 
died in poverty without reproach; and yet one who in his 
writings advocated the most cruel, cold-blooded, and 
atrocious principles, — of such a one what judgment are 
we to make? What are we to think of a statesman who 
advises us that "men must be either flattered or crushed; 
for they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but 
for heavy ones they cannot?" Such a piece of truculent 
cynicism leaves Diogenes and his tub centuries behind. 

"The Prince" differs in this respect from the "History 
of Florence." The latter work may, in the portion of it 
which comes closely to the author's own life, represent 

110 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 111 

partisan and prejudiced views, but this can only be proved 
by a painstaking investigation of the subject. Otherwise 
the spirit that animates it would seem to be that pure 
love of exposition, which George Eliot has noticed as one 
of Machiavelli's distinctive traits. After a recent perusal 
I do not recollect a single passage in it which might be 
called cynical or even sarcastic, and the satire which we 
may occasionally meet with in it is of a most amiable and 
refreshing kind. Nowhere does he descend in manner or 
material from the dignity which belongs to historical com- 
position, except in the fifth chapter of the eighth book, 
where he evidently makes game of Roberto da Rimini. 
He is always the friend of municipal independence, the 
only form of civil liberty possible in Italy during the 
Middle Ages, and always the admirer of healthy, vigor- 
ous political action, whether by princes or popular govern- 
ments. In the conduct of affairs he considers sagacity 
the highest virtue and incapability the worst of evils. 

This it is not difficult to perceive, though his usual 
style is one of judicial indifference. He never palliates 
the crimes of princes, nor excuses the sloth, negligence, 
and presumption which have often accompanied the 
inheritance of titles and high offices. Visionary schemes 
of restoring an ideal past are to such a practical mind as 
Machiavelli's of all things the most abhorrent. Yet he 
speaks kindly of Stef ano Poreari, who attempted to revolu- 
tionize Rome, after the fashion of Garibaldi and Mazzini, 
but was betrayed and put to death by the pope in 1452. 
"Though some may applaud his intentions," Machiavelli 
says, "yet he is accountable for a deficiency of imder- 
standing; for such attempts, although they may appear 
glorious, are almost sure to be attended with ruin." In 
the same narrative he refers to the dissolute manners of 
the priesthood and the mischief which they occasioned 



112 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

among both nobles and commons. If he favors one form 
of government more than another, it is that spontaneous 
Periclean authority, conferred upon the Medici by the 
citizens of Florence from the time of Cosmo the Great to 
the unworthy son of Lorenzo, with whom it came un- 
happily to an end.* It is a marvelous thing when a whole 
people with one accord intrust the best man among them 
with sole charge of their public affairs. It is something 
better than either democracy or monarchy, for it is the 
harmonious union of both. When the life of Lorenzo de' 
Medici was in danger from the conspiracy of Sixtus Fourth 
and the Pazzi, every Florentine citizen of any importance 
whatever, says Machiavelli, waited upon him with the 
offer of their life and property in his defense. The interests 
of Florence and of the Medici would seem to have been 
identical. 

Macaulay, to whom much speaking gave readiness, 
but writing not much exactness, states as a "notorious" 
fact "that Machiavelli was, through life, a zealous republi- 
can;" but this is saying a great deal too much. The only 
support I can find for it is the internal evidence of the 
History, and the fact that he was imprisoned and tortured 
by the Medici in 1513 on suspicion of being concerned in 
a conspiracy against them. The truth of this accusation 
will never be known, for no confession could be extorted 
from him; but the fact that the conspiracy was formed 
only within a year after the dedication of his book to 
Lorenzo the younger, would, to those who place any faith 
in human nature, make it appear improbable. Nor is it 
likely that Machiavelli would give a decided opinion in 
favor of the republican form of government. He was a 
trained diplomat, nursed in the school of the Borgias, and 
ready to serve the state, whichever party happened to be 
*This was also Aristotle's opinion. Politics, iii.y 13. 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 113 

in power. As a diplomat, he would certainly be prudent 
enough to preserve silence on so dangerous a subject. In 
truth, this appears to have been a pretty bold guess on 
Macaulay's part; for in his commentaries on Livy, Machia- 
velli, after discussing the nature and special advantages 
in each case of the monarchical, aristocratic, and demo- 
cratic forms of government, and explaining in the clearest 
manner how each has a peculiar weakness inherent in itself 
which has always led finally to its corruption and debase- 
ment, concludes at length that the most stable, efficient, 
and just government will ultimately prove to be that which 
<shall combine these three forms in nearly equal proportions. 
The German philosopher Hegel was of a similar opinion. 
According to him government ought to be composed of 
the one, the few, and the many; who, each with well- 
defined powers, should mutually support and restrict one 
another. If the one should exceed his legitimate authority 
and attempt to become autocratic, the few and the many 
would combine to prevent this; and so with each in turn. 
Now it happens that this is very much the sort of govern- 
ment by which an united Italy is now being regenerated; 
and it is a pity that Machiavelli should not know it; but 
if he has gone to the place which most of his critics have 
assigned to him, it is not likely that he does. 

"The Prince" was written about ten years previous 
to the "History of Florence," and perhaps represents 
a different phase of the author's life. He does not at- 
tempt in it to found a system of political science, but only 
to discuss such problems as relate to the government of 
absolute monarchies and autocratic principalities. Of 
republican governments he has already treated in his 
essay on Livy. As a matter of fact, he does not concern 
himself with the affairs of large kingdoms, like France or 
England, but with the formation of the small dukedoms 



114 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

which were then being estabhshed in Italy. He does 
indeed contemplate the construction of a large central 
power, sufficiently strong to resist foreign invasion, but 
this is rather of the nature of a speculative afterthought. 
It is evidently the government of Florence he is thinking 
of. The scope of his treatise is narrow, and its details are 
petty; broad, general views of political science do not 
enter into it. The suppression of crime, the advancement 
of learning, the extension of trade, the amelioration of 
poverty, are subjects about which Machiavelli concerns 
himself very little. Political economy, which now in its 
arrogance threatens to cover our whole mental horizon, 
was then unknown. The commerce of Italy was un- 
bounded, and but for the frequent and devastating wars 
between the different states, its prosperity would have 
been as great as that of the United States of America is 
now. The magnificent buildings erected in Italy during 
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries surpass those of any 
other country. The great Cosmo provided for the mate- 
rial interests of Tuscany upon the same principles that he 
cojj|^[i^ted, the affairs of the Medici bank, and with equal 
success ."Y No: the main argument of "The Prince" is how 
to acquire political authority, and then how to maintain 
it; the latter being a problem which it was constantly be- 
coming more difficult to solve. \ When we consider the 
book from this point of view, arid that it was written for 
the benefit of a youthful autocrat, upon whose caprices 
and immature judgment the welfare of Florence must 
inevitably depend, we have at least obtained a basis from 
which to judge fairly of its merits and defects. This, 
Macaulay, who commences with the assumption that its 
doctrines were intended for "the fundamental axioms of 
all political science, " was quite unable to do. 

There is much of the tone of a preceptor running through 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 115 

the book. It is altogether too shrewd and knowing in its 
style, and perhaps that is one reason why it was not re- 
ceived by Lorenzo with more favor. Otherwise it must be 
confessed that he gives his intended pupil a good deal of 
sound and excellent advice. In the first place, a prince, 
he says, should not give himself up to a life of idle and 
luxurious enjoyment of his authority, not to speak of 
wasting himself and his substance in dissipation; but 
should make a specialty of those pursuit^g, which invigorate 
the body and strengthen the mind. ' "A prince whose ^ 
conduct is light, inconstant, pusillanimous, irresolute, 
and effeminate, is sure to be despised: these defects he 
ought to shun as he would so many rocks, and endeavor 
to display a character for courage, gravity, energy, and 
magnificence in all his actions.^ He should avoid com- i 
mitting any action which might ^nd to make him despic- 
able or odious: and "nothing is so likely to render a prince 
odious, as the violation of the right of property and a 
disregard for the honor of married women." Even in 
those cases where he may be obliged to inflict the punish- 
ment of death, he should invariably proclaim the reason 
for it, so that his subjects may not feel that they are in 
danger of their lives from the caprices of a cruel tyrant. 
In regard to the confiscation of property, and attainder 
of blood for high treason, he has anticipated a plank in 
our own constitution. He shrewdly observes that people 
sooner forget the loss of their relatives than the loss of 
their property. (An angelic looking Chicago girl of ten 
years, when instructed concerning the Southern rebellion, 
said finally, "I should think it would be better for the 
South to have lost more men and less money.") But 
nothing infuriates men like the dishonor of their wives: a 
glance through history shows a number of monarchs who 
have upset themselves in this way. "A prince should 



116 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

earnestly endeavor to gain the reputation of kindness, 
clemency, piety, justice, and fidelity to his engagement." 
At the same time he should not carry these virtues so 
far as to seriously prejudice his own interests, and those 
of the state, — a plain truth which every prudent busi- 
ness man is aware of. It is more important that a prince 
should be feared than loved by his subjects; but he should 
also cultivate their affections as far as may be consistent 
with the preservation of his dignity; and in misfortune he 
should rely on their good- will towards him, rather than 
foreign alliances which are likely at any moment to prove 
unstable. He should let his subjects know that he places 
confidence in them, and rather take some personal risk 
than show an unreasonable distrust of them. "Neither 
should he lend too ready an ear to terrifying tales which 
may be told him; but should temper his mercy with pru- 
dence, in such a manner that too much confidence may 
not put him off his guard, nor causeless jealousies make 
him insupportable." He should practice economy in 
times of prosperity and peace, in order to provide a full 
treasury for wars and adversity; and should care little for 
being accounted parsimonious, since munificent expendi- 
tures must finally result in an increase of taxes and short- 
lived popularity. Above all things, however, the prince 
should give consideration to the military art, and make 
himself in every way an accomplished soldier, so that he 
may lead his own army and defend himself and his people 
in person; for thus would he be the more respected by 
them, and would have to depend no longer upon the 
treacherous condottiero of that time. Machiavelli con- 
demns the use of mercenary troops, and lays down the 
principle, with emphasis, that it is safer for a sovereign 
to instruct his people in the use of arms than to purposely 
keep them in ignorance thereof. Here the sun fairly 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 117 

shines through the clouds as he says, "There is no better 
fortress for a prince than the affection of his people. If 
he is hated by his subjects all other fortresses will be in 
vain, for when they fly to arms there will be no want of 
enemies without the walls to afford them assistance." 
Parliaments, "whose object is to watch over the security 
of the government and the liberties of the people, ' ' he 
considers among the wisest of institutions. The effect of 
these sage counsels on the reader is somewhat diminished 
by their being presented in the guise of self-interest rather 
than for any inherent value of their own; yet they show 
what honest thought the man was capable of. Acting 
upon such precepts, the HohenzoUern family have risen 
to the highest position in Europe; while from a contrary 
practice the Stuarts and Bourbons have gone down to 
nothing, or next to nothing. 

We in America have had very slight experience of 
monarchical government, and yet it is easy for us to see 
that the foregoing principles neither militate against 
humanity nor good sense ; but there are also other passages 
in "The Prince" of a widely different character. It is 
these which give the book its peculiar tone, and have ob- 
tained for it a celebrity much beyond that of better works 
on political science. They have proved to be hard prob- 
lems for the stoutest intellects. Not only do they seem 
to be inhuman and atrocious, but they are also uttered 
in a manner so easy and graceful as to add greatly to their 
effectiveness. Their perfect coldness makes us shiver, and 
in their keen precision we seem to feel the blade of the 
headsman's axe. They impress us in a few words like the 
last scene of Othello, or an account of the Lisbon earth- 
quake. Lord Bacon shook his head over them and doubt- 
ed if they were meant seriously. Frederick 11. accepted 
it all in dead earnest, as he did everything, and while he 



118 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

was crown prince wrote a refutation of their doctrines. 
Carlyle calls "The Prince, " " Machiavelli's little absurdity 
of a book. " 

He begins by dividing principalities into two classes; 
those which are inherited and those which may be ac- 
quired by conquest or revolution. To govern the former 
IS not difficult, since the people, being accustomed to 
obedience, will make no objection to the wishes of their 
pnnce unless he becomes extremely unreasonable. In 
the latter, it is true, more care and judgment are required; 
but "if the family of the prince who last ruled over it be 
extirpated," and the people are allowed to retain their 
ancient customs and manners, there need be little fear of 
insurrection or civil disturbance. If, however, a sub- 
jugated city or state has once revolted, it is best to destroy 
it, and colonize it with citizens from one's own country. 
"The Romans, to make sure of Capua, Carthage, and 
Numantia, destroyed them and did not lose them; and 
they were compelled at last to destroy several cities in 
Greece, in order to retain the country; and doubtless that 
was the safest way, for otherwise whoever becomes master 
of a free state and does not destroy it, may expect to be 
ruined by it himself." Napoleon III., however, in his 
"Life of Csesar," deplores the destruction of Carthage, 
and gives the true cause for it, namely, that nations, like 
individuals, sometimes lose their mental balance. Then, 
after speaking of a prince's behavior towards his own 
people, he says, "In short, it is always necessary to live 
with the same people; but a prince has no occasion to 
continue the same set of nobles, whom he can at pleasure 
disgrace or honor, elevate or destroy." Csesar Borgia, 
having conquered the Romagna, proceeded to root out the 
old nobility of that province; "and there were f< / that 
escaped him." He believes that a prince is n longer 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 119 

obliged to keep his faith or engagements with others when 
it has ceased to be his interest to do so, or when the con- 
ditions upon which his promises were given shall have 
materially changed. "I should be cautious," he says, 
"in inculcating such a precept if all men were good; but 
as the generality of mankind are wicked, and ever ready 
to break their agreements, a prince should not pique 
himself in keeping his more scrupulously, especially as it 
is always easy to justify a breach of faith on his part." 
These translated extracts and paraphrases, however, do 
not convey the same dramatic effect as the original do, 
separated from their natural surroundings. There are 
not many of them, and I think that the one which I first 
quoted, that '^men should either be flattered or crushed, " 
rather takes the lead of the rest. 

How then are we to account for this surprising contra- 
diction? Does it consist in the nature of the man, or the 
nature of his subject, or in the nature of his times? Was 
it intentional or accidental? Had Machiavelli a hidden 
purpose in giving his work an appearance of heartless in- 
difference to humanity, an aristocratic air of sang froid: 
or was he quite unconscious of the sensation that it would 
produce? Had the man a perverted moral vision; or was 
he, like Walt Whitman, possessed of a familiar demon 
who put in a sentence occasionally to mar the perfection of 
his pages? Macaulay, whose essay is the popular source of 
information on this subject, finds an explanation, in the 
fact that Machiavelli was an Italian, and that Italians 
are by mental construction given to wiles, treachery, and 
furtive homicide, to a degree which the Anglo-Saxon is 
fortunately exempt from. Especially at this time they 
were goin' through an historical process which made the 
cultivatioi of certain vices a public necessity. They had 
long since 5pensed with the courage of the lion, and were 



120 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

now compelled to rely on the cunning of the fox. Since 
they could not crush their enemies with the strength of 
the boa, they were driven to make use of the venom of 
the cobra. Where an English gentleman smarting under a 
grievance would have challenged his aggressor to mortal 
combat, an Italian would have resorted to a hired assassin; 
where the English yeoman would strike his adversary 
with his fist, the Italian peasant would use a stiletto. As 
a consequence of this, acts that in one country would be 
considered cowardly and base would be accepted in the 
other as a matter of course: England would condone the 
youthful follies of Henry the Fifth, his cruelty, and his 
ruthless invasion of France, for the sake of his matchless 
valor and military skill. So would Italy forget the crimes 
and perfidy of Borgia, in admiration for the boldness and 
skill with which he surmounted all obstacles to his enor- 
mous ambition. Then he passes from history to fiction. 
Where an English audience, Macaulay says, would have 
little but commiseration for the calamities which Othello 
brings upon himself through jealousy and credulity, an 
Italian audience would only feel contempt for the man 
who allowed himself to be duped by one to whom he had 
previously refused important favors. On the other hand, 
they would no doubt applaud lago's shrewdness and dex- 
terity — just as James Fiske, Jr., was formerly admired by 
many Americans,— though they could not approve of his 
methods. Machiavelli, when he calmly proposed the 
extirpation of a noble family, could not have imagined 
that posterity would be shocked by it. 

I have substituted Csesar Borgia in this argument for 
Francesco Sforza, who is Macaulay's example of a per- 
fidious Italian, because Borgia is an example cited and 
approved of by Machiavelli. Sforza committed some acts 
of treachery and a few crimes, but would pass muster any- 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 121 

where for as good a man as the hero of Trafalgar, whom 
indeed he greatly resembles, both in his duplicity and his 
brilliant fighting qualities. He cannot, therefore, serve 
fairly as an illustration of the case. Altogether this argu- 
ment seems overwrought, and strained from the point. 
There is some truth in it, but not enough to cover the sub- 
ject. It is undeniable that the Latin races, and particu- 
larly the Italians, have a different ideal of morality from 
the Teutonic races. They have special excellencies of 
their own, and also certain vv^eaknesses. The reputation of 
the Italians for their power of dissimulation has been quite 
equal to that of the French for their lack of formal sincer- 
ity. It is true, also, assassination, especially by poisoning, 
has been more frequent and horrifying in the annals of 
Italy than of any other Christian country. Yet do the 
crimes of Alexander VI. surpass those of Richard III.; 
and are either to be accounted for on the ground of nation- 
al differences.? We know the poetic horror of Dante, 
and the eloquent rage of Savonarola for the flagrant cor- 
ruption of the papacy. The proceedings of the Borgias 
were not without parallel in Italian history perhaps, but 
they were without parallel in their own age. What has 
made them famous but the horror which these excited, 
for they finally accomplished little except to ruin them- 
selves and their whole family. Their misdeeds were not 
looked upon with indifference; and the popes who suc- 
ceeded Alexander for the next half century were fairly 
good men. Neither does it appear that the treachery of 
Francesco Sf orza to the Venetians ' differs very much in 
kind from Nelson's sudden seizure of the Danish fleet in 
time of peace. Both were dictated by the law of self- 
preservation. The shrewd Francesco foresaw that affairs 
would soon take such a turn that his interests and the 
Venetians would come into conflict. If he had not deserted 



122 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

them, they would have been forced to leave him in the 
lurch. He acted thus, not as an Italian especially, but 
as a general of hireling troops, and no better was to have 
been expected of him. Even if Lorenzo the Magnificent or 
Julius II. had done the same, the case would barely have 
a national significance; but they were as a rule faithful 
to their engagements. Since the invasion of the Lombards, 
there has been no period of Italian history which equals 
in horrors and atrocities the Wars of the Roses in England, 
or of the period of the Reformation in France. 

Now if "The Prince" represented the current opinion 
of Italy in the sixteenth century, we should expect to find 
the same "moral obliquity," not only in Machiavelli's 
other writings, but in those of various authors of the same 
period. In the discourses on Livy, it is true there are 
two passages almost identical with those quoted from 
"The Prince," and — let us note this as a characteristic 
trait of the man — ^there is a tendency in it to vindicate 
acts of the Roman conquerors when they carry matters 
with a high hand; but he invariably excuses himself for 
doing so, and alleges such reasons for his determination, 
that even a strict moralist could not find them altogether 
groundless. The tone of the work is different, and the 
impression it leaves on the mind of the reader is much 
pleasanter than that of "The Prince." How Machia- 
velli's dramas can be brought into court on a question of 
moral obliquity it is difficult to understand. It would be 
as fair to hold Moliere responsible for the character of 
Tartuffe, or Lessing for that of Marinelli. In regard to 
the history of Florence, I lately made a series of refer- 
ences while reading it under various headings, such as 
"depravity," "evidences of a moral sense," "mistaken 
judgment," and many others. Now under the head of 
depravity there are no references to the "History," but 



INiACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 123 

there are nine or ten to "The Prince," while under evi- 
dences of morahty there are ten references to the "His- 
tory" and five to "The Prince." Nor do I believe there 
can be found in the "History " a more pronounced instance 
of moral obliquity than the statement of Thiers that the 
combined losses of the Prussians and English at Waterloo 
exceeded by ten thousand killed and wounded those of 
the French; or than some of Macaulay's own statements 
in regard to Lord Bacon, Frederick the Great, or in the 
essay we are now considering.* Yet in this essay there 
are also brilliant and valuable passages. In truth, what 
he says of Machiavelli would apply with some modifica- 
tion of tone to Macaulay himself. Qualities altogether 
dissimilar are united in him. We are charmed by the 
vigor of his writing, and repelled by the weakness of his 
generalizations. In one paragraph he gives us the clearest 
insight into the mechanism of political parties or dexter- 
ously unravels court intrigues; in the next he stumbles 
blindly over his subject, like an ambitious and self-sufficient 
undergraduate. He astonishes us with the variety and 
extent of his information, as well as by his lack of fixed 
principles and a philosophical basis. He writes an essay 
on Queen Elizabeth and calls it " Burleigh and his Times; " 
he writes an account of the causes which led to the French 
Revolution and names it "Mirabeau." There is nothing 
to speak of about Burleigh or Mirabeau in either of them. 
In many passages he shows a fine sense of character. 



*After commenting on " the difference between the Italians and their 
neighbors" (French, Spanish, and Greeks?), he moralizes thus: "A vice 
sanctioned by the general opinion is merely a vice. The evil terminates 
in itself. A vice condemned by the general opinion produces a pernicious 
effect on the whole character. The former is a local malady, the latter a 
constitutional taint." This surpasses Mephistopheles' advice to the 
young student. 



124 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

especially a clear understanding of human weaknesses; 
as his artistic delineation of Charles the Second is a good 
witness. Against this we must place his uncharitable pre- 
judices against William Penn and the Quakers. He shows 
true penetration when he says that "a reforming age is 
always fertile to impostors;" but what reckless political 
judgment it is to call Csesar Borgia the greatest practical 
statesman of his time. It would be difficult to improve 
on his criticism of Machiavelli's comedies, but his remarks 
on what he is pleased to call "the egotism of Petrarch" 
prove that he wholly misconceived the nature of egotism, 
and of subjective poetry as well. As a writer he is lively 
and interesting, but without grace or elegance of style. 
His talk is not like conversation in a parlor, but con- 
versation on the sidewalk. Correct and upright in his 
dealings with men, it is yet to be feared that his moral 
sense was a good deal blunted by the late dinners and 
fashionable society of his time. But this is a digression 
not unlike some of his OT^^l. 

As "The Prince" stands alone among Machiavelli's 
works for its ethical peculiarities, so is its author also 
without a counterpart among Italian writers of the best 
quality. There is at least only one other, a composer of 
squibs, epigrams, and pasquinades, the Venetian scourge, 
Pietro Aretino, who resembles him at all in this respect; 
but Aretino was notoriously immoral and unprincipled, a 
sort of literary Cartouche. Ah, it is idle to suppose that a 
great and glorious civilization, such as flourished in Italy 
in the fifteenth century, could be based on habits of dis- 
simulation, treachery, and cowardice. There can be no 
great art without courage and sincerity. How evident 
is the sincerity of Raphael; and how renowned that of 
Michel Angelo. If these men had been alone in their day 
they might be considered accidental; but they had hun- 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 125 

dreds of followers, thousands of appreciative admirers; 
there were others also very nearly their equals. If they 
were exceptional geniuses, it may be said that only excep- 
tional conditions make such men possible. Genius is the 
gift of nature, but its development is the work of man: 
it requires protection, patronage, and culture. It must 
be self-reliant, but it also has to depend upon others. In 
large part we are indebted for Michel Angelo to Lorenzo 
de' Medici, Pope Julius and Pope Adrian, His most per- 
fect work was done during the pontificate of Julius II., and 
Grimm, his biographer, considers that the mental influence 
of Julius (who according to Macaulay had an ill-regulated 
mind) was necessary for this. These statesmen must 
have shared largely in Michel Angelo's noble nature, as 
Pericles did in that of Sophocles and Phidias, or else they 
would have been repellent to him, and the relation would 
not have borne good fruit. It was Lorenzo who took him 
away from his father, and saved his lofty soul from being 
crushed out by parental stupidity. Paris is now the chief 
centre of the fine arts, but there a nature so susceptible 
as that of Raphael or Correggio would become perverted 
in its youth, and inevitably go to ruin. There would not 
be sufficient moral health in the community to avert this. 
In America they would suffer equally from a lack of 
protection. Benvenuto Cellini, to whom Goethe paid the 
highest of all compliments by translating his memoirs into 
German, belonged to the lower middle class of Tuscany, 
was without social refinement and with little education. 
He was artist, soldier, musician; worked hard, fought 
bravely, and enjoyed life in a hearty, sensible manner. 
He is not a scrupulous fellow, but bears malice towards 
none. He is the Fielding of Italian prose, and thoroughly 
English in his frankness, directness, and good humor; and 
yet he is not an exotic, for the people whom he describes 



126 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

breathe the same fresh air and enjoy the same healthy life 
that he does. I think it must have been the perfect moral 
sanity of the man, and of his writing, for which Goethe 
liked him so well. 

To make a fair estimate of Italy in the year 1500, we 
must take into the account men like these, as well as the 
Borgias and Aretinos. The sincerity of an artist is per- 
haps the highest type of sincerity, for it consists in a 
mental attitude which cannot be formulated. It is to be 
hoped that the popular impression, that the life of an artist 
is necessarily an effeminate and enervating one, has now 
pretty much gone out of fashion. There aie many such, 
but they are never of a high rank. Neither are great 
artistic periods necessarily followed by a national decline, 
as we see now in the vigorous internal development of 
Germany. The fruit ripens and the leaves fall, but the 
tree, unless it is exposed to too severe a winter, will again 
put forth buds and blossoms in the spring. This is what 
happened in Italy during the seventeenth century, though 
in a rather abortive manner; for the eclectic school, found- 
ed as it was upon a vicious principle, contained many men 
of genius. There was no lack of courage, no lack of true 
manliness among Machiavelli's countrymen. Take, as 
an example, that Genoese mariner, the first to cross the 
Atlantic, whose name is the plaything of every schoolboy; 
or that other Genoese who was the first admiral of his age. 
All the Medici were brave. Piero Capponi cowed the 
French king in the city hall of Florence, and Francesco 
Ferucci, whose death was the knell of Florentine liberty, 
was nowise inferior to the modern Garibaldi. The north- 
ern hirelings of Bourbon and Orange, who sacked Rome 
and reduced Florence, were very roughly handled after- 
wards by an army of Italians in the plains of Lombardy. 
Cellini himself helped to defend the Castle of St. Angelo 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 127 

against them. But the highest prize in this line must be 
awarded to Julius II., who took Csesar Borgia into his 
palace, and lived for weeks within striking distance of that 
human cobra, before having him shut up in a Spanish 
prison. Eighty years later the best general in the armies 
of Philip II. was an Italian; and until the middle of the 
eighteenth century the Piccolomini, Montecuculi, Eugene 
of Savoy, and a score of lesser lights distinguished them- 
selves in the service of Austria. It was not art which pre- 
cipitated the decline of Italy. Jesuitism, and the blood- 
stained gold of Mexico, which gave to the Spaniards an 
overpowering political importance, were the twin causes 
of its demoralization and disgrace. 

Professor Reichert, when he commenced to investigate 
the venom of the rattlesnake, found, to his surprise, that 
instead of being a single uniform poison, it was composed 
of three separate and wholly distinct poisons. The pro- 
cesses of nature are not simple, as some of her admirers 
would have us believe, but in most cases very complicated; 
and it is the business of man, acting in a rational manner, 
to bring order and simplicity out of the confusion about 
him. As it is in external nature, so it is also in the human 
mind. There is no more intricate study than metaphysics, 
and if we could investigate the mental methods of a saint, 
or of a country maiden, either would no doubt be found 
to have a somewhat composite character. So if we con- 
sider those sentences in Machiavelh's "Prince" which 
seem most obnoxious to us, and treat them according to 
the cautious and inquisitive principles of scientific re- 
search, perhaps we miay find in them also that various 
different influences have combined to produce a single 
effect. It will be recognized that every man receives at 
birth a certain mental bias which largely determines the 
future course of his life; that his profession or occupation 



128 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

has also a modifying influence upon him and that he is 
Hkely also to be prejudiced by the current beliefs and 
opinions of his time. When these three do not, in some 
measure, counteract one another, they cause a striking 
deflection from the normal curve of human perfection. 

In the first place, then, we notice that a slightly pessi- 
mistic tone pervades the whole treatise; a lack of con- 
fidence in human nature. This is not uncommon in 
political writings among men who have had an extensive 
experience in public affairs. Macaulay is by no means 
free from it; Mettemich has been charged with it; and if 
there is anything more pessimistic than J. Stuart Mill's 
essay on government one would like to hear of it. His 
fundamental axiom, that "one man if stronger than an- 
other will take from him whatever that other possesses 
and he desires," is worse than Machiavelli's proposition 
that "the generality of mankind are wicked and ever 
ready to break their word," because it denies the possi- 
bility of justice or generosity except from interested mo- 
tives. How many notable statesmen besides Webster 
and Sumner and Beaconsfield have died gloomy and 
despondent at the condition of affairs which they were 
leaving. It says in the preamble to our Constitution, "in 
order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure 
domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, 
promote the general welfare, etc, " and the main object of 
government could hardly be stated better; but the largest 
share of a statesman's work is of a very different kind. 
He must keep these general priuciples in mind, like a sort 
of north star to guide his course by, but it is no wonder 
that he often loses sight of them. In politics the fiercest 
passions of mankind come into play, scarcely less fierce 
than those which are engendered by war. That the actions 
of men are wholly prompted by self-interest is the shallow- 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 129 

est sophistry; but they are largely so prompted, and it is 
necessary and right that they should be. All the different 
interests of the community meet in the political centre, 
each represented by talented and able men, and each 
pushing its claim to the utmost, regardless of all others, 
and of the general welfare. This is the side of human 
nature with which the statesman comes into daily con- 
tact. To decide between different interests, and to curb, 
control, and direct the energy with which they are forced 
upon him is often cruelly hard work for the most high- 
minded administrator; not unfrequently more than he is 
able to accomplish. Whichever way he may look he sees 
nothing but self-interest in human form, and it is no won- 
der if at last he is driven to the conclusion that egotism 
is the rule and patriotism the exception, — that it is only 
"the remnant" that can be depended upon. Besides the 
honest partisans who press their side issues with the zeal 
of fana ticism, the patriot politician is also obliged to deal 
with a class of people who are only more virtuous than 
common criminals in that they are more prudent, who 
take to intrigue, dissimulation, and the construction of 
mischief as naturally as cold-blooded animals take to the 
water. Such men may not be without a certain lukewarm 
regard for their native country, but they do not let that 
interfere with the advancement of their own fortunes by 
the most unscrupulous means, and they find, in the con- 
fusion and strain of political life, a fruitfxil field for the 
cultivation of their peculiar talents. There are enough 
of this sort to be found now in America, but in the Middle 
Ages, when crime was more frequently avenged than 
punished, they were much more bold and numerous. He 
who has had experience of them cannot be altogether 
blamed for exclaiming sometimes with Frederick II., "Of 
what infernal stuff is human nature made?" 



130 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

But in Machiavelli's time politics were at their very 
worst. It was the period of transition in Europe from the 
pohty of the Middle Ages to that of modern times, and 
the receding tide of the past was mingled in a surging 
charybdis with the advancing flood of a new era. Every- 
where in France, Spain, Italy, and Austria, local inde- 
pendence was being crushed out, to be replaced by a 
despotic centralization with the divine right of kings very 
near at hand. During the last five centuries Italian 
civilization had been wrought out in a conflict between 
the pope and the German emperor. In 951 Otho I., having 
been called into the country by Pope John XII. to restore 
order and drive out the Saracens, was invested with the 
imperial dignity. This he happily accomplished, and 
under his protection Italy started forth into new life and 
prosperity; but from this time the German emperors con- 
sidered themselves entitled to superintend Italian affairs, 
and by the customs of the feudal period they certainly had 
the right to do so. This, however, was not agreeable to 
the Italians, since no people will submit to being controlled 
by a foreign power if they can possibly prevent it; and 
hence arose the most peculiar system of politics of which 
there is any record. The pope, in order to maintain 
himself amongst the small Italian principalities, was 
obliged to reinforce his temporal power and material 
means. This brought him into immediate collision with 
the emperor on questions of authority; for as the highest 
spiritual potentate he could yield to no one else in dignity 
of position. Legally his temporal and spiritual powers 
might be distinguished, but with the public it was impos- 
sible. His material means were insignificant compared 
with the emperor's, but his spiritual influence over the 
minds of men was enormous. This grew continually great- 
er, as the crusades stirred up religious enthusiasm, until it 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE*' 131 

overtopped everything. Alexander or Timour never en- 
countered such a terrible adversary: it was like fighting 
with an invisible enemy. He could unite the scattered 
states of Italy against the emperor, and if that were not 
enough call in the king of France to his aid. Then, if still 
defeated, he would have recourse to the terrors of excom- 
munication. In this manner the pope finally gained com- 
plete ascendency, utterly destroying the magnificent 
Hohenstaufen race, to the great injury of both Germany 
and Italy. It was a policy like that of the viper towards 
its benefactor, but had for its excuse the necessity of 
national independence, without which there can be no 
right development of a people. 

Italian unity, however, did not exist, and it was not for 
the pope's interest that it should exist. He could not be 
the chief executive of tha country any more than an 
English sovereign can be a leader in the House of Com- 
mons. All Christendom would have cried out against it. 
The emperor especially would have come down upon it 
like the wolf on the fold. At the same time a king of 
Italy was something which the supreme pontiff dreaded 
more even than the emperor, who sometimes disappeared 
beyond the Alps for several years together. Neither did 
the small Italian states desire that the papacy should 
become more powerful than any one of themselves. Ven- 
eration for the papal office was always greatest at great 
distances, — as commonly happens, — and the governments 
of Milan, Venice, Florence, Bologna, and the rest were 
jealous of the papacy and of one another. Both the pope 
and the emperor encouraged the foundation of free cities 
as a check upon the influence of the lesser princes; and 
each city had its local politics of two inevitable parties, 
one of which was supported in course of time by the 
emperor and the other necessarily by the pope. The 



132 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

violence vnih. which Italy was racked during the Middle 
Ages by the factions of Guelph and Ghibeline is thus ex- 
plained. It is bad enough when a city possesses within 
itself, as the Italian cities did, the power of banishment 
and death for political offenses; but here, weighted on one 
side by the authority of the pope and on the other by 
power of the emperor, civil dissensions were raised to a 
magnitude far beyond their true importance. The fires 
of party passion were kept up with an oxy-hydrogen blow- 
pipe. 

This curious political fabric was particularly well 
adapted to the fertile ingenuity and versatility of the 
Italian mind. To form a league against the emperor, 
and afterwards to set the most powerful members of it 
fighting amongst themselves, was the pope's chief business. 
Alliances were formed and dissolved again like smoke. 
If a state or city became more prosperous and powerful 
than its neighbors, it was certain to be attacked by them 
in concert, and when upon the point of being crashed by 
superior odds it was equally sure to be preserved by having 
its cause espoused by a seceding minority of its adversaries. 
Or at the last moment the emperor suddenly appeared 
out of the Bremier Pass, and turned the tables for every- 
body. The free cities made war on the coimtry nobility, 
and compelled them to live inside of their walls; and the 
nobles in revenge conspired together against the liberty of 
the cities. No other country has ever been cursed with 
such politics. Ancient Greece comes nearest to it, and 
next Germany after the close of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. 
Yet these three and the Netherlands are the only countries 
in which the arts of design have reached a high degree of 
perfection; and there may be some mysterious connection 
between that fact and the absence of a centralized govern- 
ment. The artist, at any rate, would not suffer from the 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 133 

benumbing influence of the fashions in a great metropolis. 
Whoever the persons are who set the fashions they are 
not trained to a keen perception of the beautiful. 

Certainly in Italian politics sincerity, fidelity, disinter- 
estedness, would have been as much out of place as they 
might be now among the stock gamblers of Wall Street. 
Intrigue, dissimulation, and treachery were an absolute 
necessity in such an element. A high-minded statesman 
like Hildebrand, who reformed the Catholic Church, might 
object to making use of these methods, and probably did so 
a"^ rarely as possible; but to avoid them altogether was to be 
left stranded in the shoals. The fear of treachery became 
the father of treachery. The enemy of yesterday was 
the friend of today and the traitor of tomorrow. Machia- 
velli says in his "History of Florence" {B.I. 6): "Henry 
of Luxemburg had been elected emperor, and came to 
Rome for his coronation (1315 A. D.), although the pope 
was not there. His coming occasioned great excitement 
in Lombardy for he sent all the banished to their homes, 
whether they were Guelphs or Ghibelines; and in conse- 
quence of this, one faction endeavoring to drive out the 
other, the whole province was filled with war and con- 
fusion; nor could the emperor with all his endeavors abate 
its fury. " This shows conclusively how hopeless it some- 
times is in politics to attempt what is abstractly right. 

This was the profession to which Machiavelli was 
trained. The principles upon which Italian statesmen 
had acted for centuries were accepted by him as a matter 
of course. This explains, I think, the graceful sang froid 
with which he sets them forth. Had he possessed more 
of Dante's ethical quality, or Barbarossa's downright 
sense of justice, he would probably have chosen a difiEerent 
profession, and left the affairs of state to others. We can 
be thankful that it was not so; that he could serve his 



134 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

native city well and bravely at a time when trustworthy 
men were fortunately still in request, and that he could 
bring the light of practical experience to bear on his histori- 
cal studies. But this personal bias forms another element 
in the alembic of "The Prince." The portrait of him 
which has been preserved to us gives the impression of a 
small, erect, determined-looking man, with an expression 
on the face which reminds one slightly of the St. George 
of Donatello: a man apparently of the nervous-bilious 
temperament, inclined to look on the dark side and calcu- 
late for the worst; a resolute, strong-headed fellow, seK- 
eontained, who might go through life without asking or 
giving sympathy. The rather small head, about the size 
of Byron's, has a compressed look as if there were strong 
forces within; the short, stout nose may perhaps indicate 
obstinacy; and the eyes are steady, inscrutable, unflinch- 
ing, in their gaze. It certainly is not a bad face, but neith- 
er is it an attractive one. There is no aspect of humanity, 
benevolence, or compassion in it — least of all a look of 
spirituality. The man was a realist in the most limited 
sense of the word. I feel as if his shell was harder than 
that of other people. It is not a noble physiognomy. He 
was neither an Aristides the Just nor a Henry IV. of 
France; neither high-minded nor great-hearted; but most 
like that keen, quick-witted, inflexible Frederick of Prussia, 
"the steel-bright soul," as Carlyle calls him. There is 
ample evidence of his realistic narrowness in a letter writ- 
ten on the eighth of May, 1497, describing to a friend in 
Rome one of the last of Savonarola's discourses in public 
before the counter-revolution which destroyed him. 
Machiavelli belonged to the party opposed to Savonarola, 
which, it may be said, contained every person of sound 
judgment in Florence, as well as all the profligate. His 
practical good sense made clear to him how dangerous to 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 135 

the public the daring moral absolutism of this eloquent 
monk might become; but beyond that he could see nothing. 
Of the purity of Savonarola's motives, of the sublime 
religious elevation of his mind, which so charmed Michel 
Angelo and even fascinated Lorenzo de' Medici, Machia- 
velli had no conception. He even believed that Savona- 
rola's enthusiasm was wholly a trick of rhetoric to inflame 
the minds of the multitude, and secure himself in his 
position of authority by undermining that of other in- 
fluential citizens. After an account of the discourse, as 
unfriendly as possible, Machiavelli finishes thus: "And 
he (Savonarola) has turned all his fury against the pope 
and his emissaries, terming him, as he does, the vilest of 
men; it is thus that he veers from point to point, to paint 
and color his fraud and cunning. " Now it was quite true 
that the pope Alexander Borgia was one of the vilest of 
men; and if Machiavelli had possessed spiritual insight 
he never would have written a book like "The Prince." 

Machiavelli was at this time in his twenty-ninth year. 
Five years later he was sent by the Florentine government 
as ambassador to Caesar Borgia, who was then at the 
height of his power. The party which had accomplished 
the downfall of Savonarola naturally became the ally of 
Alexander, and of his son; and their opposition to the 
return of the Medici was another good reason for it. Csesar 
himself was very much such a man as Aaron Burr, of 
brilHant intellect but of a coarse and ordinary nature. 
Nature had lavished every bounty on him, excepting her 
best, mental quality. He was born a prince, but had the 
soul of a bull-fighter; the statue wa;s of heroic mould, but 
its material was dross. There is no human combination 
more dangerous to the man himself as well as others; for 
it requires penetration, a sense of reality, to see the man 
as he actually is . These natural impostors draw ambitious 



136 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

young men and giddy women about them, as a magnet 
draws iron filings. Machiavelli understood diplomacy 
too well to be overreached by Csesar, but he was evidently 
fascinated by him. It is surprising that he should have 
been; but the numerous passages in "The Prince" in which 
he illustrates his theme by references to the policy of 
Caesar Borgia, and even the exceptional tone of some of 
them, leave no doubt of it. He even satisfied himself that 
Csesar was acting from patriotic motives, that his severe 
measures were needed for the public good. "Csesar Bor- 
gia," he says, "was accoimted cruel; but it was to that 
cruelty he was indebted for reuniting Romagna to his 
other states, and establishing there the peace and tran- 
quillity which it so much required. " One would think it 
had been better to have taken his illustrations from the 
career of Julius II. There must have been something in 
Caesar's slashing methods peculiarly attractive to Machia- 
velli's mind. 

It is just in this that Borgia made his mistake in practice 
and Machiavelli in theory. There have been occasions 
in the world's history, and there may be again, when the 
violation of a treaty, or the taking of human life without 
form of law, has been necessary snd justifiable; exceptional 
cases for which no rule would apply. That any system 
or code of politics, however, could be based upon such 
principles and bring benefit to mankind, is an error similar 
to that of Ignatius Loyola. Machiavelli indeed antici- 
pated Loyola; and in both cases it was largely the influence 
of their different professions. What the Jesuits are to be 
blamed for is not the doctrine that the end justifies the 
means, but for making use of means which the end could 
not justify. For in most cases it is only the end which does 
justify the means. Wliat, for instance, justifies the whole- 
sale slaughter of cattle and sheep except our use of them 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 137 

as food? What justifies killing our enemies in war, unless 
it be that we preserve the nation by doing so? What can 
justify the small deceptions we practice upon children 
but the necessity of preserving them from knowledge 
which would be a certain injury to them? Indeed, if we 
consider it well, what justifies the use we make of our time 
in this world but those worthy objects to which we devote 
it, — and it is to be feared that much of it is spent in a way 
which will never be justified. There is no absolute stand- 
ard of morality, and those who try to live by one do much 
harm to themselves and often a good deal to other people. 
Even hypocrisy, the most contemptible of vices, is some^ 
times a virtue. There is no standard, but an ideal of 
m6rality, to which we strive to conform as much as possi- 
ble; and those who have lived the noblest lives are aware 
how difficult that is. The captain of a sailing vessel wishes 
to make a certain port in the shortest time, but he cannot 
sail always straight towards it. He has to suit himself to 
every wind that blows; to tack here and there; to lie to in 
severe storms, or even to go wholly out of his course for 
the chance of obtaining more favorable breezes. In like 
manner are we obli^d to steer our course over the eternal 
deep, sacrificing to adverse winds much or little according 
to the force with which they blow. In a recent publica- 
tion the lives of Longfellow and Goethe were compared 
together, much to the advantage of the former; but it 
would have been as just to compare a summer excursion 
to the Azores with the circumnavigation of the globe. 
There is a point, however, beyond which the sacrifice of 
means to ends should never pass. Whenever one nearly 
balances the other, whenever the gain and loss approach 
to an equality, and this fact continually repeats itself, we 
may know that our course is no longer upon the high seas 
but towards some frozen and unnavigable northwest 



138 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

passage, — ^that the voyage we proposed has proved to be 
impossible. 

Such was the condition both of the CathoHc Church 
and of Itahan poHtics at the commencement of the six- 
teenth century. Each had become so bad that a violent 
revolution alone could save it. Machiavelli saw this 
plainly in the case of the papacy, but was blind to it in 
his own profession. In his "Essay on Livy" he blames 
the pope and cardinals for their evil practices and for hav- 
ing caused the disintegration of Italy. With every polit- 
ical structure there comes a time when it ceases to respond 
sufficiently to the requirements for which it was instituted; 
and then, unless it contains within itself the germs of a new 
development, its end is near. 

The spiritual authority of the pope, which had served 
but poorly to maintain cohesion among the states of Italy 
even at its height, had now declined to almost nothing. 
What had been originally a badly constructed edifice was 
now undermined and tottering to its fall. No human 
power could save it: and with it must go all that was 
beautiful and great in Italian life, A political vacuum 
was being formed again in that devoted country after a 
thousand years; the Frenchman and Spaniard were ready 
to rush in. Who can blame Machiavelli for hoping against 
what was hopeless, and dreaming of desperate measures 
to save that which was doomed.? If Florence could no 
longer preserve its independence by the wisdom and valor 
of its first citizens, craft and dissimulation could not help 
it long. If Italy could only be reformed by extirpating 
the country nobility, reformation had come too late. The 
sacrifice of means had become equal to the end in view: 
the day of retribution was at hand. Machiavelli did not, 
or would not, perceive this, but a certain monk in Witten- 
berg knew it only too well, and with courage equal to his 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 139 

insight struck the blow which has divided Europe ever 
since. 

It was the lack of Italian unity, rather than the inherent 
weakness of the Italian character, which precipitated the 
rapid decline of the following century. It was the Church 
of Rome which prevented this unity. For the truth of 
this there could be no better witness — if witness were 
needed to so plain a proposition — than Machiavelli him- 
self. In the discourses on Livy, book first and chapter 
twelfth, he says: "We Italians then owe to the Church of 
Rome and to her priests our having become irreligious and 
bad; but we owe her a still greater debt, and one that will 
be the cause of our ruin, namely, that the church has kept 
and still keeps our country divided." Presumably it was 
for this plain exposure that his writings were condemned 
by the Council of Trent, and anathematized by several 
following popes. Cardinal Pole, who was the first to ex- 
claim against the atrocious doctrines in "The Prince," 
and who afterwards helped to promote the human con- 
flagrations at Smithfield, may have had a similar reason 
at heart. It is well to note in this connection that, during 
the long struggle between the pope and the emperor, the 
bishops in the large cities of northern Italy were nearly 
always to be found on the side of the latter; a fact which 
the historian Hallam finds himself quite unable to account 
for, as he is unable to account for the lack of concerted 
action in ItaHan politics, except upon the ground of "dark, 
long-cherished hatreds, and that implacable bitterness 
which, at least in former ages, distinguished the private 
manners of Italy." But such passions always come into 
play when a people is divided into small independent 
commimities. Petty local jealousies strike root and grow 
to great dimensions, unless controlled by the stern man- 
date of a higher authority. The Lombard cities preferred 



140 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

to dissipate their wealth in fighting with one another than 
to pay a Hght tribute to the Hohenstaufens. 

Lastly, we ought to remember that "The Prince" 
was written for a special object. It was not published 
until after Machiavelli's death, and possibly was not in- 
tended by him for publication. The character of the man 
to whom it was dedicated is also an element in the problem 
but of that unhappily we know little. We have his statue 
by Michel Angelo, an elegant biit muscular figure with a 
long, sinewy neck and a head of the meanest dimensions. 
If the face expresses anything, it is insensibility to danger. 
There is no trace upon it of mental or moral endowment. 
Perhaps it is not a good likeness, but it has certainly not 
been idealized. The remark of the sculptor that in one 
hundred years no one would care how those Medici looked, 
that is, Lorenzo II. and Juliano, has a wide significance. 
It seems likely there was little that could be said of him. 
There are certain men of sordid nature to whom, though 
not vicious themselves, all talk of virtue, morality, good- 
ness, and especially reform, is instinctively hateful. They 
dislike being made conscious of their deficiency in these 
attributes, which they find it troublesome to imitate. 
Lorenzo may have been one of this sort. If he was, it 
would readily explain the tone of guarded concession to 
morality which appears at intervals in "The Prince," as 
for instance, "It is not necessary, however, for a prince 
to possess all the good qualities I have enumerated, but 
it is indispensable that he should appear to have them." 
Counseling a narrow and dull-witted chief magistrate, 
whether he be prince or president, must be somewhat like 
driving a pig to market. Machiavelli had been too long 
in politics to be able to keep out of them, for no other 
human occupation is so absorbing. One of his cardinal 
maxims is that a statesman must watch the changes of 



MACHIAVELLI'S "PRINCE" 141 

his time and suit himself to them. He saw that the Medici 
were carrying all before them in Rome, and that his only 
chance hereafter for benefiting himseK or his country must 
come through their hands. Let those blame him who are 
without reproach themselves. 

"The Prince," after all that we may say of it, remains 
substantially a picture of the politics of those days. Ma- 
chiavelli approved of dissimulation under certain circum- 
stances, but he himself has told us the truth. Like Shake- 
speare, he spoke out his mind with no reservation. What 
a revelation of human nature is Henry VI. or Richard 
III.! The poet has given us in dramatic form what 
Machiavelli says in plain prose. In these plays we watch 
the extirpation of the Plantagenet family as it proceeds 
from one branch to another. Was it not the last of them, 
the Countess of Salisbury, who was put to death for that 
reason by Henry VIII.? The veneration for hereditary 
right during the Middle Ages was so strong that it cannot 
be doubted such acts were sometimes necessary for the 
public good. Fortunately, they are so no longer; but we 
can be grateful both to the poet and the historian, that 
they saw the life before them without illusions, that they 
comprehended it clearly, and that they concealed nothing 
of it from us. Such a past seems more real than the 
present. A faithful account of our politics now would 
not wear so ferocious an aspect, but it might not be much 
pleasanter to contemplate, and quite as startling to those 
who dream that the millennium is close at hand. The 
tricks of lobbyists, the artifices to win voters, the clap-trap 
speeches, the boundless misrepresentations; the use of 
calumny in political canvasses, — ^the pot calling the kettle 
black a^ain; dreary congressional debates which end in 
nothing and were intended mainly to end in nothing; 
patriotic men, after vainly endeavoring to accomplish 



142 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

something, deafeated and driven into retirement; coarse 
flattery of the pubHc, — all this forms a spectacle more 
instructive than edifying. Tennyson was not far wrong 
when he called the last general election in England "a 
popular torrent of lies upon lies. " What is at first a slight 
distortion, or exaggeration of facts, soon becomes a mental 
habit, and in course of time neither orator nor audience 
can distinguish longer what is real from what is imaginary. 
In this manner political aspirants may attain the objects 
of their ambition, but they lose by it that practical good 
sense which is necessary for the conduct of affairs. The 
perusal of Machiavelli's "Prince" might instruct them in 
the awful seriousness of political responsibility, even if 
statesmen are no longer in danger of losing their heads 
for it. 



THE IDES OF MARCH 

THE birthdays of few great men of antiquity 
have been preserved for us, and in Julius Caesar's 
case we are not even certain in regard to the 
year of it; but every one knows the day when 
he died, that is, the fifteenth or sixteenth of March. The 
greatest writers have considered this one of the most 
important events of history, and yet the world has never 
come to a decided opinion in regard to its moral character. 
Cicero, who two months previous had glorified Caesar 
almost to the gods, three months afterwards glorified 
Brutus and Cassius in a similar manner. Plutarch, a 
hundred and fifty years later thought that Caesar's assas- 
sination was displeasing to the gods. In the fourteenth 
century Dante condemned Brutus and Cassias in a most 
severe poetical manner by placing them nearly on an 
equality with Judas Iscariot. Gibbon is rather non- 
committal, but he condemned Augustus for making war 
on his own country. Modem writers since Gibbon have 
been equally divided on the subject. 

However we may look at the act from a moral stand- 
point, there can be no question that as a practical matter 
it was a political blunder. 

Nothing was gained by it, and many lives were lost. 
It would seem to have accelerated the tendency to Caesar- 
ism, which had been developing in Rome for the past 
eighty years, and not only did it result in the death of all 
the conspirators, but also of Cicero, Marcellus and two 

143 



144 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

hundred other honorable members of the aristocratic 
party, who would otherwise have hved as long as Caesar 
did. 

In fact it was wholly owing to the forbearance and 
foresight of Mark Antony that the conspirators were not 
put to death at once. 

Lepidus marched his army into the Forum and was 
going to have them tried by court martial; but Antony 
persuaded him not to do this, and even invited Brutus 
and Cassius to dine with him, which might be called the 
summit of diplomacy. 

I cannot discover any contemporary evidence that 
Csesar intended to overturn the government of the Repub- 
lic; though it is evident from Cicero's Orations that he was 
suspected of this. It seems more likely that he was 
assassinated in order to establish the supremacy of the 
senate, rather than from political rancor, or as Shakespeare 
supposes, from the spirit of envy. It is useless to speculate 
on what Csesar intended to do, and it is highly probable 
that he had not yet decided this for himself — so soon after 
his return from the war in Spain; but there would seem to 
have been only three courses open to him. He might 
have followed the example of Sulla and resigned his dicta- 
torship after the country became paciiBed; or he might 
have retained it for an indefinite period; or he might have 
devised a wholly new form of government, which would 
have borne the stamp of his own genius. Froude states, 
I do not know on what authority, that Julius Csesar in- 
tended for his next move to take the field against the 
Parthians who were ravaging the frontier of Asia Minor. 
In that case he must have left the government of Italy 
in the hands of the consul, and perhaps his adventurous 
spirit would have led him like Alexander to make an 
invasion of India; but it is impossible to tell. 



THE IDES OF MARCH 145 

In order to obtain an idea of the government which 
Augustus Caesar abolished we must imagine the whole of 
the United States to be governed by the millionaires of 
New York City, who were to appoint all the governors 
and chief justices, and be responsible to no one; while the 
city itself would be ruled by two mayors, holding office 
on alternate days — one appointed by the millionaires and 
the other by an assembly of the citizens in Central Park. 

Tacitus says in his very first chapter that Augustus 
claimed the tribunician power for the protection of the 
common people, and this confession is more important 
because Tacitus himself belonged to the aristocratic or 
senatorial party. Besides this Augustus claimed the 
presidency of the senate, and the command of the army. 
He had no more external signs of power than the consuls 
did formerly, and except that he held his position for life, 
it did not differ essentially from the presidency of the 
United States. It might have done well enough if all the 
emperors had been like Augustus and Antoninus Pius; 
but the wonder is that the Roman people did not rise up 
en masse against the atrocities of Caligula and Nero. 

It is true that they were finally assassinated, but this 
required time. No Christian nation at the present day 
would endure such political depravity, and it is true that 
after the revolution of Constantine in 338 A. D. such 
imperial monsters as Nero, and Commodus did not appear 
any longer. As General Grant says; "Nations suffer for 
their sins like individuals," and the bad emperors were 
the price the Romans had to pay for the destruction of 
Carthage and Corinth, and the sacking of Athens. 

I am not superstitious; nor do I believe in omens, in 
spiritualism, or Christian Science; but I have long been 
convinced that there is a divine order in history. Acci- 
dents and the imperfections of human nature give the 



146 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

affairs of men an irregular and unfinished appearance, but 
one can discover a kind of logical sequence in it which 
seems to indicate the presence of a guiding hand. Even 
if we believe that the impulse to this originates in our 
own hearts, we may well ask how did it come there, and 
we should always remember Cromwell's saying, "That 
he goes farthest who knows not whither he is going. " All 
the great actors in the world's drama would seem to have 
accepted this principle. Moreover how does it happen 
that such men appear when they are most needed, and 
do not turn up on other occasions. It is easy to see that 
there has never been a place for such a man as Napoleon 
in English history; and if General McClellan had proved 
the military genius that his friends anticipated, the south- 
ern confederacy would have been suppressed before the 
abolition of slavery could have taken place. Thei'e may 
be truth in the theory that the Roman Empire was neces- 
sary for the extension of Christianity to the northern 
nations of Europe. 

The connection between Lincoln's assassination and 
the play of "Julius Caesar" as was noticed by the English 
press is startling. Wilkes Booth had acted in that play a 
number of times, and on one occasion he became so excited 
in the part of Cassius that the other actors are said to have 
been afraid for their lives. He was a bad aotor and a 
wild, disorderly fellow. Party passion is so perverting 
to the moral sense that no doubt Booth considered Lincoln 
one of the worst of tyrants. Both assassinations were 
committed in the interest of plutocracy. 



GOETHE IN PRACTICAL POLITICS 

GOETHE himself has said that the faults of 
great men seem exaggerated as well as their 
virtues; and if we apply this principle to his 
own case, it ought to remove much of the odium 
which rests on his name. Some of the accusations which 
have been brought against him are undoubtedly just; 
but it is equally certain that others have originated either 
in party prejudice or from the jealousy of his literary con- 
temporaries. He is certainly to blame for his desertion 
of Frederika, and probably for other flirtations, — though 
such behavior does not always seem to militate against a 
man's character. Goethe's love affairs, though by no 
means to his credit, were of quite a different sort from the 
immorality of Byron, Burns, and Heine. The accusation, 
however, that he was a selfish aristocrat, unpatriotic, 
insensible to the sufferings of the poor, and opposed to the 
popular and reformatory movements of his time, is untrue 
and unjust, and can easily be disproved. That he was an 
aristocrat cannot be doubted; but so was Walter Scott, 
for they were both brought up and educated at a period 
when aristocracy was considered the natural order of 
society. 

Of all classes of people, none would seem to be so unfitted 
— from their tenderness of feeling, their pictorial habit of 
mind, and their sensitive temperament — ^for practical 
politics, as poets and artists; and they have generally recog- 
nized this themselves. Emerson says: — 

147 



148 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

If I leave my study for their politique, 

Which at the best is trick. 

The angry muse puts confusion in my brain. 

There is scarcely a reflection in Shakespeare of the 
religious and physical struggle in which he was born and 
brought up; and though Milton accepted a position in 
Cromwell's government, it proved more to his own disad- 
vantage after the restoration of the Stuarts than for the 
benefit of his country. The angry muse likewise drove 
Dante into banishment for joining the party of the Ghib- 
elines. 

Yet there are occasions of public exigency when it is 
the duty of every man, whatever his calling, to devote 
himseK unreservedly to the welfare of the state. No one 
was more ready than Goethe to admit the truth of this, 
but the opportunity to prove his patriotism never came 
to him. 

He was born in a community more free than any city 
in the United States, for there was neither state nor 
national authority above it; but, as often happens in small 
independent communities, public opinion was so tyrannical 
there that Goethe was glad to escape from it, even to the 
conventional atmosphere of the Weimar court. No per- 
son, he says, was permitted to be conspicuous in Frank- 
fort, either for good or for evil; but Goethe could not help 
being conspicuous, any more than Arthur Plantagenet 
could help being the son of Geoffrey. At Weimar, Goethe 
was advanced from one position in the duke's service to 
another, until at last he became minister of state, and was 
the confidential adviser of his patron all through the 
Napoleonic wars. 

How was he to conduct himself in such a position? 
How do the members of presidents' cabinets conduct 



GOETHE IN PRACTICAL POLITICS 149 

themselves? Are they not as reticent as possible in re- 
gard to all matters which are immediately under discus- 
sion? They give an opinion, perhaps, in order to avoid 
the appearance of secrecy, but they guard themselves 
carefully against anything which might compromise the 
administration. So anything which Goethe might have 
said, any political opinion he might have uttered, would 
at once be attributed to the grand duke, and pass current 
over the whole of Em-ope. Under these circumstances, 
he had no resource but absolute reticence; and for this 
plain and self-evident reason almost nothing is known of 
his opinions concerning the important events of his time. 
It is one of the most common and stupid of blunders to 
suppose that a silent man is an apathetic one. 

Weimar is a small duchy, lying between two kingdoms; 
but so great is the veneration of Germans for hereditary 
right that its boundaries have always been respected. 
There was no such feeling in Napoleon's composition; he 
abrogated the charters of free cities, and exiled many 
German princes from their dominions. There was danger 
during his conflict with Prussia that Weimar would be 
forcibly annexed to one side or the other on the ground of 
military necessity. The only resource in such times for a 
state without any military force was to be as cautiously 
neutral as possible. That was the part which the grand 
duke and Goethe were obliged to act, not only for their 
own benefit, but for that of their people; and they would 
seem to have played it to perfection. 

Napoleon passed through Weimar in 1806 without 
molesting man or property. He sent for Goethe to take 
dinner with him; and then for the first and only time either 
of them met his equal. They were more alike perhaps 
than is generally supposed, — one the apostle of liberalism 
(after a fashion) in politics, the other in intellectual life; 



150 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

Goethe was also a conqueror. The accusation that he 
behaved in a servile manner toward Napoleon is too 
grotesque to be considered for a moment. The emperor 
said to his marshals after the poet had withdrawn from the 
table, "There is a man for you. " 

Goethe possessed the rare faculty of seeing both sides 
of a question. It is a faculty which belongs by good right 
to the dramatic poet, for it is only the dramatic habit 
that will cultivate it. He was both liberal and conserva- 
tive. He says in one of his brief proverbial poems, "Hold 
fast to the old, but ever with open hand welcome the new. " 
He has been blamed by his countrymen for his partiality 
toward Napoleon, which was supposed to be the result of 
personal admiration. There is quite as good reason for 
believing that he had an equal sympathy with the reforms 
which Napoleon enacted in Germany, Italy, and Spain. 
Even the socialists admit that Napoleon conferred great 
benefits on Western Germany. Could the impartial 
Goethe be oblivious to what was taking place in the states 
adjacent to Weimar.^ 

Liberalism does not mean the same in Germany that it 
does in the United States. Its aim is not a republic, but 
rather a monarchical democracy like that in England. 
In the revolution of 1848 the German republicans were 
almost all socialists. In Goethe's time liberalism meant 
the abolition of class privileges, the right of voting taxes 
and armaments by elective assemblies, and freedom of the 
press. In 1813 many of the German liberals, like the 
enthusiastic Heine, took sides with Napoleon; but a larger 
number joined the Prussians on the groimd of nationality, 
being desirous to free themselves from French domination. 
It is known that Goethe's son was at that time an ardent 
Napoleonist, and that Goethe himself discouraged recruit- 
ing for the Prussian army in Weimar. Surely the man 



GOETHE IN PRACTICAL POLITICS 151 

who could predict an earthquake in Sicily was able to 
foresee the tremendous conservative reaction which would 
immediately follow Napoleon's downfall; but Goethe's 
liberalism is not a matter of inference or conjecture. 

Less than one year after the battle of Waterloo, j&rst of 
all the German princes, the Duke Carl August of Weimar 
granted his people a constitutional government which 
admitted freedom of the press, the right of franchise for 
all citizens, and the right of voting taxes. Can any one 
suppose this was done in opposition to Goethe's advice? 
We know the characters of the two men. Both were 
reserved; but Goethe was kindly, conciliatory, and always 
ready to listen to the opinions of others, while the duke was 
naturally haughty, self-willed, and autocratic. It is thus 
that Goethe represented him in the character of Thoas. 

Unfortmiately, the Holy Alliance set its iron jack-boot 
on this incipient growth of liberalism, and crushed it out. 
Carl August was notified by the great powers that he must 
abandon the position he had assumed, and no choice but 
obedience was left him. With the spasmodic outbreaks 
which followed during the next ten years, in various parts 
of Germany, Goethe had little sympathy, for it was easy 
to see that they aggravated the trouble instead of help- 
ing it: he knew them to be as imprudent as they were 
hopeless, and when they culminated in the foolish assassina- 
tion of Kotzebue, (which is supposed to have prevented the 
adoption of a liberal constitution in Prussia) there was 
nothing he could do but avert his face in sorrow. Goethe 
always preferred temperate measures and a gradual prog- 
ress in reform to sharp and violent revolutions; but if he 
had been a conservative in the usual meaning of the word, 
he would have belonged to the party of Wellington and 
Metternich, and would never have been reproached with 
partiality for Napoleon. On the occasion of the small 



152 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

rebellion of the students at Jena, he said that the students 
were right, but that the grand duke was also right and 
must be obeyed. 

I would compare Goethe in this respect with no less a 
person than President Lincoln. What do we honor Lincoln 
for so much as for his proclamation of freedom for the 
slaves? And yet the politicians who nominated him at 
Chicago hardly knew whether they were voting for an anti- 
slavery candidate or not. They knew only that they were 
voting for a man they could trust. Horace Greeley de- 
clined to vote for him because Lincoln had not distinctly 
committed himself on the slavery question. In his cam- 
paign against Douglas he opposed in a vigorous and decided 
manner the extension of slavery in the territories, especially 
when the attempt was made to force it on the people, as 
the government was doing in Kansas; but in his Cooper 
Institute address he deprecated all legislation which might 
interfere with slavery where it was already established. 
Does any one doubt that Lincoln was at heart an anti- 
slavery man.? The anti-slavery cause was part of the 
great humanitarian movement of the nineteenth century; 
and a man who was so magnanimous and compassionate as 
Lincoln must certainly have felt this. He believed that 
the cause could be promoted better by his silence than by 
anything he could say. He waited his time until he should 
be able to deal with the evil in a more effective manner 
than by words; and the logic of events justified him. 

Such an opportunity never came to Goethe; but we 
read in " Wilhelm Meister's Indenture of Apprenticeship, " 
"They who see the half of a matter are apt to talk and 
say a great deal about it; but he who sees the whole of it 
feels inclined to act, and speaks late or not at all." A 
wise sentence, and of universal application. 

Goethe did not, like Schiller, idealize the common 



GOETHE IN PRACTICAL POLITICS 153 

people, but he always treated them in his writings with 
respect, and strove to represent the good that is in them 
as well as their peculiarities. There are many instances 
of this, but especially the scene of Easter Sunday in the 
first part of "Faust." "Hermann and Dorothea" is a 
pastoral of humble life that never has been matched. If 
the common people had not been interesting to Goethe 
he could not have written it. When a lady of rank com- 
plained that the characters in " Wilhelm Meister" did not 
belong to good society, Goethe replied in a verse : 

"I have sometimes been in society called good, from 
which I could not obtain an idea for the smallest poem. " 

There is substantial proof in Eckermann's Conversa- 
tions, and in other records, that Goethe maintained a lively 
interest in public affairs till the time of his death. 

In the fearful cyclones on the coast of Asia which occur 
during the changing of the monsoons, there is a central 
space where the storm does not rage. So in the little 
duchy of Weimar, while the wars of Napoleon were raging 
all around, there was calmness and peace like that of the 
mighty intellect which has made it famous. It was the 
intellectual centre of Europe. 



DANTE'S POLITICAL ALLEGORY 

DANTE evidently intended to illustrate his own 
views in regard to the politics of his time by 
the celebrated enigma in Purgatorio xxxii. 
To describe this briefly in its main featm^s : 
— he has placed a triumphal car, drawn by a griffon, be- 
neath a tree loaded with flowers and fruit; an eagle comes 
down crashing through the branches of the tree, and strikes 
the car, making it rock from side to side, but without up- 
setting it; then a fox comes, lean and hungry, who takes 
possession of the car, but is driven away by the reproof of 
Beatrice; then the eagle swoops down again, leaving the 
car covered with its feathers; a dragon comes out of the 
earth and rips up the floor of the car with its barbed tail. 
Then the car, covered with feathers, puts forth seven 
heads, with horns like beasts, at the four sides. Next 
comes a giant in company with a harlot; the former pluck- 
ing the leaves from the tree, and the latter seating her- 
self in the car; but when the harlot turns her eyes on 
Dante, the giant flogs her unmercifully, and drives the 
equipage into a forest out of sight. 

There have been numberless interpretations of this 
allegory; but Dugdale, the English prose translator of the 
Purgatorio, sums up the opinion of previous commentators 
as follows: — 

The tree is intended to represent Christ; and its flowers 
are the foretaste of his glory. The triumphal car repre- 
sents the Christian Church; the descent of the eagle into 

154 



DANTE'S POLITICAL ALLEGORY 155 

the tree, the persecution by the Roman emperors; the 
fox is heresy; the second descent of the eagle, with the loss 
of his feathers, represents the benefits conferred by Con- 
stantine. The dragon is supposed to be either the Devil 
or Mahomet; and the seven heads are supposed by some 
to represent the seven deadly sins, and by others, the 
seven sacraments. (Take your choice.) The giant is 
evidently the king of France, and the harlot represents 
the prostitution of the church to personal ends. The dis- 
appearance in the woods signifies the transference of the 
Holy See to Avignon. Beatrice represents theology. 

Now, it is possible that Dante intended by this to repre- 
sent the history of the church in allegorical form, but his 
treatment is much too meagre for such a large subject. 
Is it not more likely that he was minded to symbolize the 
condition of the Church of Rome in his own time? Looked 
at in this manner all the figures unite to form a perfect 
whole. The tree cannot represent Christ and his heavenly 
triumph, for Dante expressly states in the next canto that 
it is the same tree from which Eve plucked the forbidden 
fruit: canto xxxiii, 60. Inferentially it may be intended 
for Christianity itself, by which the true knowledge of 
good and evil was supposed to have been first divulged. 

Neither is it likely that Dante would have made use of 
a triumphal car as a symbol for the Christian Church. 
The expression is lacking in humility. We may suppose 
therefore, that Dante intended it for the temporal power 
of the popes, which, when properly applied and directed 
to Christian teaching and good works, caused the tree to 
flourish, but when this was allied with the powers of dark- 
ness its flowers drooped and its leaves withered. 

The first descent of the eagle is not exactly a fair sym- 
bol for the persecutions of the early Christians, for the 
church withstood them like a rock. On the contrary, it 



156 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

serves remarkably well for the reign of Frederick II., who 
repeatedly shook the papal government to its foundations, 
without, however, quite carrying his point. 

There is a significant allusion to the second descent of 
the eagle, xxxii, 138, Forse con intenzione casta e henigna, 
which would not apply to Constantine, the shrewd poli- 
tician, but is quite what we should expect from Dante 
concerning the chivalrous Henry VII., for whom it was 
no doubt intended. 

Here, as in the first canto of the Inferno, the fox is 
probably intended for heresy; but it is a symbbl that would 
be better suited to skepticism, which penetrates every 
where but finds no permanent abiding-place. 

Dugdale supposes that Beatrice represented theology; 
and Scartazzini speaks of her as religious science, which 
comes to the same purpose; but she appears everywhere 
as the antagonist of science. Does she not rather repre- 
sent religious faith, pure and simple, — man's recognition 
of the divine love? Dante finds her seated under the tree 
of Christianity. 

I bblieve there is no difference of opinion in regard to 
the meaning of the giant, the harlot, and the disappear- 
ance of the strangely decorated car; but what does the 
griffon stand for.? Dante speaks of him as a creature of 
"twofold nature." May not this refer to the nature of 
mankind in general, which is at once spiritual and car- 
nivorous? 

In the last canto of the Purgatorio, Beatrice propounds 
a prophecy in the form of a riddle, to the effect that "a 
messenger from God, "DUX,* will come to slay the giant 
and his companion. This has been interpreted as refer- 
ring to Can Grande of Verona; but the number is a remark- 
able prophecy, for the first revolutions in Italy tending to 
*RealIy, cinquecento died e cinque, equals D V X = Dux. 



DANTE'S POLITICAL ALLEGORY 157 

national unity took place a little more than five hundred 
years after Dante's death; and the Reformation began in 
1520. 

However, we are not to suppose that Dante possessed 
such remarkable insight for future events as this would 
indicate; and his immediate purpose was evidently the 
organization of an Italian power that would be strong 
enough both to repel foreign invaders, and to prevent 
the pope from interfering in purely secular affairs. This 
never came to pass until 1860, and since that time there 
has been peace and prosperity in an united Italy. 



LYNCH LAW 

THE Progressive party in 1912 put forward as 
one of the propositions for the pubHc good the 
suppression of the Lynch Law. 
There could be no objection to this, so far as 
the burning of southern negroes is concerned, but during 
the year which I spent on the frontier in Kansas and 
Colorado I made careful inquiries in regard to the criminal 
practice there, and I became satisfied that Lynch Law was 
not only the most efficient law, but quite as just and more 
expeditious and vastly less expensive than the practice of 
our eastern courts. In fact I could not learn of a single 
instance where Lynch Law had been improperly applied. 
At Abilene in western Kansas, I inquired if any murders 
had been committed there recently. Yes, there had been 
one about six months previously. Two men had a quarrel 
and one shot the other without giving him any warning. 
The quarrel did not appear to have been a very bad one, 
but such as might have caused a year's estrangement 
between gentlemen. If it was not murder in the first 
degree it was certainly murder in the second. I inquired 
what became of the homicide, "Oh, he was taken to 
Kansas City and tried, but he was acquitted: he had too 
many friends. " In fact he was not punished at all. 

At Wallace I made the same inquiry with precisely the 
same result, except that in this instance the murderer was 
imprudent enough to return to Wallace, after he had 
been acquitted at Kansas City. The night he arrived 

168 



LYNCH LAW 159 

there a vigilance committee was organized, and he was 
hung before morning. My informant saw him hung. 

At Lakin a hundred miles south of Wallace, and about 
six months before the time I was there, a blacksmith shot 
and killed the doctor of the place, and galloped off in the 
direction of the Indian territory. When I visited Lakin 
a year later he was supposed to be living with the Indians, 
but no effort had been made to arrest him by the state 
authorities. 

Six months later Billy Larey and his brother, noted 
stage robbers and murderers, were taken from the jail at 
Del Norte by a vigilance committee and hung. I still 
have a photograph of them somewhere taken after they 
were dead. They had escaped from jail once and the 
good people of Del Norte were determined that they 
should not do so again. 

It is evident from these four examples that without 
Lynch Law no man's life would be safe on the frontier, as 
it is or was at that time. At out-of-the-way places like 
Lakin I never left the house without my rifle and the 
savage looks which some of the cow-boys gave me showed 
plainly the hostility they felt toward me. 

At Manitou, Colorado, the previous July, one negro 
porter had shot another merely because the latter had been 
more highly favored by a party of distinguished eastern 
men. He was only given two years in the State's prison 
for it. An old New Yorker, who claimed to be a friend 
of William Vanderbilt, said to me, "he was a good fellow 
and they did not want to be hard on him, besides his family 
would have to be supported by the state," but the hotel- 
keeper's wife informed me that the porter had two thousand 
dollars in the bank, at Colorado Springs, which dis- 
appeared at the time of his trial, and was supposed to 
have gone into the pocket of the judge. 



160 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

I attended a murder trial at Denver, of a man who had 
been tried twice already, but the jury disagreed as they 
often do in the west. It was purely a case of extenuat- 
ing circumstances. I did not follow the case closely, but 
Mr. Bristol of Stamford, Conn., did so, and told me, he 
could not see any excuse for the murder and that the 
defendant ought either to be hung or imprisoned for life. 
Yet the man was acquitted, and I was informed that no 
murderer had ever been hung in Colorado by regular pro- 
cess of law. 

The case of lynching in northern Colorado the following 
winter was much discussed at our boarding place in Denver 
and an Illinois lawyer gave his opinion that every person 
concerned in the business ought to be hanged, but he did 
not find any one to agree with him in this legal pedantry. 

The summary execution of the man who shot the 
Indian Chief, Johnson, in '82, was a case of Lynch Law 
supported by government. It happened in this way. A 
party of Indians with Johnson at their head were walking 
their horses past a mining camp, when one of the miners, 
seized with moral madness, caught up a rifle and shot him 
through the neck. The other miners realizing that a 
fearful deed had been committed, seized and bound the 
offender and explained to the Indians (who behaved 
remarkably well) that justice should be done. Both 
parties proceeded to an encampment of U. S. soldiers 
which happened to be nearby, and delivered their prisoner 
to the Commander, who had him strung up at once, as 
the only method of preventing an Indian outbreak. Yet 
there was some palliation for the man's crime, since 
Johnson was one of the leaders in the "Thornberg Mas- 
sacre." I will introduce here an incident on a different 
subject to show the pettiness of the law, in certain cases. 
A Chinese wopian in Denver sold her younger sister to a 



LYNCH LAW 161 

Chinaman for a wife; as she had a right to do by Chinese 
custom; but the sister objected to this, being aheady in 
love with another man. The elder sister accordingly 
locked her up in the garret to bring her to terms, but the 
younger one spoiled that game by getting out onto the 
roof, sliding down a water spout and running off with her 
own Chinaman. The Mayor of Denver however, had the 
young couple brought back and imprisoned for several 
weeks until the judge of probate finally decided that they 
had a right to be married. 

A case of shooting occurred in Denver, in the winter of 
'81, which might have been used as a precedent at the 
trial of Harry K. Thaw. 

A man named Stickney, a Harvard graduate, who had 
always borne a good character, was greatly annoyed by 
the attentions of another man to his wife. He never 
alleged that this had reached a criminal point, but only 
that it caused gossip, and made his home intolerable. I 
did not learn the final provocation, but one day Stickney, 
seeing the objectionable man on the other side of the street, 
fired at him with a revolver. The first shot missed its 
object, and killed a lady who had come to Denver for her 
health. 

His second shot brought down the right victim. In the 
trial that followed, the plea of insanity was of course 
introduced, and Dr. Ira Russell of Winchendon, Mass., 
who had known Stickney in previous years, was sent for 
to assist him. Dr. Russell testified that Stickney was of 
an emotional and excitable nature, and that in such 
persons, under great mental excitement, the blood would 
rush to the head, and compel the individual to act without 
reflection, as a man does when he is struck in the face. 

This appears to have satisfied the jury and Stickney was 
discharged. Whether he would have been by an Eastern 



162 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

jury is uncertain, but his aggravation was much less than 
Harry K. Thaw's and he had more time in which to reflect 
on it. In fact it would be difficult to imagine a greater 
aggravation than Thaw received from Stanford White. 
It was certainly worse than assault and battery. Stokes, 
the assassin of Jim Fiske, was pardoned by the Governor 
of New York after two years imprisonment, and he had 
less cause for grievance than either. 

An officer in the U. S. army in 1886 shot a Southerner 
(who had grossly insulted him) in the right shoulder and 
for this he was first reprimanded, and when the man after- 
ward died of a fever, he was imprisoned for one year by a 
military court martial. 

The palliation in his case was, that he evidently did not 
intend to kill his antagonist, and the wound ought not to 
have been fatal. He afterwards became a worthy citizen 
of my own state, and at one time he was talked of as a 
candidate for Governor. 

Insanity as a plea in criminal cases has been worn thread- 
bare. Elaborate arguments have been written to prove 
that Martin Luther was insane, and that Napoleon was 
insane; but such opinions always come from the opposition. 
General Sherman was called insane simply because he was 
far-sighted, and predicted the future. If Doctor Folsom 
had been a Garfield Republican it is not likely that he 
would have tried to prove that Guiteau was insane. 
Neither do I believe in the abolition of capital punishment. 
Joseph II. of Austria tried that experiment one hundred 
and forty years ago, but crime increased so rapidly that 
he was obliged to return to the old severe method. Reason 
dictates, however, that the death penalty should be re- 
served for the worst class of cases, and where there are 



LYNCH LAW 163 

mitigating circumstances such should always be con- 
sidered. 

It is the law in Italy, that if a man kills another in a 
duel, he is subjected to two years in prison for the privilege; 
and this would seem to be both just and expedient. It 
would be well if there were such a law in certain portions 
of this country. The practice of shooting at sight is a 
barbarous custom, and ought to be punished more severe- 
ly. I should have given Thaw five years of imprisonment 
and Stickney seven years. I think also that fatalities 
from evident carelessness ought to be punished, like that 
of the man who recently shot a young woman with a rifle 
when she was working in the same room with him. That 
will tend to make people more prudent. As the country 
fills up Lynch Law will naturally disappear before the 
advance of legalized order. 

All the law is good for is to protect property and punish 
crime. Justice can only be enacted by individual 
judgment. 



METAPHYSICS 

It is the Mind in the universe that makes it go. 



Wasson. 



MIND AND BRAIN 

I DO not believe that substantial progress will ever 
be made in metaphysics until it has been decided 
once for all whether the mind and the brain are one 
and the same thing or two different things. To me 
at least, it is evident that the mind and the brain are very- 
different things. One reason for this I find in the fact that 
the mind is a unit — there cannot be two minds in the same 
person — whereas physiologists have now decided that the 
brain has localized functions. For instance what was 
formerly called violinist's rheumatism is now considered to 
be the wearing out of the brain cells which govern the 
motion of the right hand, but the mind is not similarly 
affected. 

It is likewise certain that an impulse given to the nerves 
by the mind or will cannot be instantly recalled in the 
same manner that our minds change. Every good pianist, 
every fine engraver knows this; and I have noticed it 
sometimes in shooting at birds with a rifle. 

A lady once said to me while I was discoursing on 
Italian art, "You are fortunate to carry a picture gallery 
round in your head. " Then it occurred to me that our 
brains are picture galleries, or photographic registers, of 
all the impressions of our five senses, as well as our reflec- 
tions, decisions and actions in regard to the same. If you 
ask a recondite question of an eminent lawyer you may 
observe an expression on his face as if he were looking for a 
misplaced book in a library; and when the clerk of a large 
hotel is asked for a quiet room it will seem as if his mind 

167 



168 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

were running through all the chambers in the house. The 
mind may occupy the brain much in the manner that 
electricity has possession of the magnet, but with the 
faculty of directing its attention to different portions 
thereof. Thus the mind walks as it were through its 
cerebral museum like a custodian; examining, comparing, 
and classifying its vast and varied contents. This mental 
comparison and classification is what we call logic or 
reasoning. Correct reasoning however depends much 
more on veracity of purpose than on any logical rules. 

This scheme might or might not preclude a remembrance 
of earthly affairs in a futm-e life — who knows all the pos- 
sibilities of mind, — but it certainly would not preclude the 
consciousness of our identity as individuals, a cognizance 
which must even precede our birth, in the struggle of the 
offspring for a separate existence. 

Emerson says somewhere that the discovery of the 
correlation and conservation of forces brings us very near 
to God; that is, to the ultimate original force. In a similar 
sense we can imagine from the Rontgen light how God 
may look into our minds and see the thoughts that are 
printed on the brain. Every man's head contains his 
own biography; but — the love of a true woman, the 
kindness of a good Samaritan, or an act of real heroism 
brings us much nearer to God than the correlation and 
conservation of forces. 

Physical phenomena, like an earthquake or the fall of 
an iron meteor, may have impressed the primitive man 
with the idea of a power in the universe superior to him- 
self, but they never could have given him the sense of an 
all-wise beneficent Creator, such as we read of in the book 
of Genesis — "and God saw that it was good. " 

That could only have been derived from the dictates 
of his own conscience — the soul of man inspired by God. 



SPACE AND TIME 

HERBERT SPENCER has developed his 
theory of space and time in some forty 
printed pages without coming to any very 
definite conclusion that I can discover, ex- 
cept that we derive our notions of them from experience, 
and that they are not, as Kant and Hamilton supposed, a 
-priori cognitions or forms of thought. His statement has 
throughout the character of an argument rather than of 
an investigation; and Spencer would seem to have changed 
his opinion during the course of this, for on the third 
page of his chajpter on space he says : — 

"If space be an universal form of the non ego, it must 
produce some corresponding universal form in the ego a 
a form which, as being the constant element of all im- 
pressions presented in experience, and therefore of all 
impressions represented in thought, is independent of 
every 'particular impression;" 

and again on page 233 : — 

"With such further reasons for holding that space is 
not a form of the non ego disclosed to us by experience 
we may be encouraged to continue that analysis of our 
perception of it collaterally entered upon in the last 
chapter. " 

This appears very much like a contradiction in terms, if 
not in fact. In the revised edition of his Psychology — ^now 

169 



170 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

a rare book — ^hie speaks of space as an "objective reality, " 
and also as "an ability to contain bodies." He distin- 
guishes between occupied and unoccupied space. He 
thinks time may be converted into space. 

In regard to unoccupied space it may as well be said at 
once that we know nothing of it objectively. So far as 
the Milky Way matter exterds, and, who can tell what is 
beyond the universe? We do not even know what is 
beyond our atmosphere. 

Experience may be either subjective or objective. 
Hunger is a subjective experience; cold an objective one. 
Life itself is an experience and yet life precedes all expe- 
rience. Investigaton of our mental faculties is an expe- 
rience, and yet it is with these faculties that we make 
the investigation. Spencer evidently thinks that our 
experience of space and time is objective. 

WHAT IS SPACE? 

Following Shakespeare's suggestion that with a bait of 
error one may catch a carp of truth, and without carping 
at Mr. Spencer, who frequently uses this method himself, 
we may, perhaps, learn something of the true character or 
quality of space, by considering what is included in this 
dictum. 

An objective reality has been frequently defined as an 
entity which is cognizable by the senses; and if this were 
not so, it is quite impossible to imagine how we should 
have experience of it, — how we could become conscious of 
it. Now which of the senses brings us into relation with 
the objective reality called space? We certainly do not 
smell space; neither do we taste it, nor hear it. The 
question remains whether we can feel it or see it. In 
order to feel an object, however, it must have consistency 



SPACE AND TIME 171 

or weight; in order to see an object it must have color. 
This is a proposition which there is no disputing. Now 
has any physicist ever succeeded in weighing space; has 
any artist succeeded in painting a reproduction of it? 
But the Spencerian repHes that if we cannot see space we 
can see into it and through it; if we cannot feel space, as 
we do a brick wall, we can feel the spaces on the wall 
marked by the bricks with our eyes shut, and thus obtain 
an idea of the division of space; that it is by noting the 
relations of the different objects which we see, near and 
far, that we obtain a conception of universal space. 

Metaphysics is a science of delicate perceptions and a 
strict definition of terms. What is customarily meant 
by looking into space, is looking at the sky, and the sky 
is an optical illusion. If the atmosphere had no color 
we should see nothing there except the clouds. It is true 
that we can look through a glass, and that glass is an ob- 
jective reality; but we cannot at the same time look 
through an object and be conscious of its existence, unless 
we also see it. Unless we perceive that glass is glass, we 
are liable to knock our heads against it, as birds do in a 
conservatory. We commonly perceive reflections on the 
glass, or the green color at its edges, which prevent our 
doing this; but there are no reflections or coloring which 
assist us to determine the objectivity of space. These 
are proverbial expressions which cannot prudently be 
used as the terms of a syllogism in philosophy. The same 
is true of measuring spaces, on a wall, or clock, or any flat 
surface. What is meant properly in this case is distance, 
and not space in the abstract. Now distance is linear, 
but space extends in every direction; it might be called an 
abstract universal polygon. Marking distances on a 
plane surface will assist us to obtain a conception of num- 
ber, but not a conception of space. Shall we not conclude, 



172 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

thterefore, that space is not an objective reality, as air and 
water are objective realities? 

Herbert Spencer would seem to have been half conscious 
of this, for we soon afterwards find him defining space 
as "an ability to contain bodies." 

Ability, however, is a force, — light is an ability of 
combustion, and electricity is an ability, — ^and a necessity 
of all forces is that they should be present in one place and 
absent in another; whereas space is, as above mentioned 
present everywhere, and always in an equal degree. No 
writer has ever contended that space was a force, physical 
or mental. 

Herbert Spencer, indeed, begins with the assumption 
that there is occupied space and unoccupied space, — ^that 
is, bodies and vacua; but he soon loses sight of this distinc- 
tion, and writes as if space and the atmosphere were 
synonymous terms. This is the common materialistic 
mistake in considering the subject. There is space for 
human beings in the atmosphere, because it is our element; 
but the atmosphere is a body as well as the earth, and if 
space is likewise an objective reality it is difficult to under- 
stand how the two can coexist in the same place. A metal 
bar charged with electricity might seem an exception to 
this, but all metals are more or less porous, and even the 
densest can be penetrated by the electric fluid just as 
granite absorbs water. The attempt to materialize space, 
like the materialization of spirits, must always result in a 
contradiction of this sort. If there is space in one body 
there must be in another, even if the first is a gas and the 
second a solid. If there is space in the atmosphere there 
must also be space in the earth, and space in a cannon-ball. 
Now a cannon-ball may be galvanized, but another ob- 
jective reality can coexist in it only after a hole has been 
bored in the metal. This would seem to reduce the ob- 



SPACE AND TIME 173 

jective reality of space to an absurdity. On the other 
hand, if space only exists in a vacuum, it may fairly be 
contended that we neither know nor can we learn anything 
about it. Some astronomers believe that there is no such 
thing as an absolute vacuum, but that the universe is 
filled with gases in a finely attenuated condition. 

The truth would seem to be that space and time are 
mental forms of measurement, and have no objective reality 
whatever. The subject goes back to Plato's forms, which 
really lie at the base of all metaphysical inquiry. Every- 
thing created by man is composed of two distinct elements, 
— an objective material and a subjective or intellectual 
form. Thus a yardstick is an objective reality, but it 
contains a subjective element, the yard, which taken by 
itself has only a subjective existence. This becomes more 
apparent when we consider a mile, a degree, or any larger 
form of measurement, which never receives a concrete 
form. It is the same with all other methods of measuring 
distance or extension; and space, which might be defined 
as universal extension, is the most abstract conception 
of this class, and is the most purely and absolutely mental. 
All universal conceptions, like all generalizations, are 
mental and subjective; for in external nature we only meet 
with individual and particular objects, which the mind 
classifies by a mental method. The word universe itself 
is used as an intellectual abstraction. 

Considered relatively there is space for a man in the 
atmosphere, for a fish in water, for a borer in wood, and 
for angle worms in the earth. 

What is commonly intended by space, is either room 
to breathe, live, and move in, or the prospect subtended 
by the angle of vision; and there is a significant relation 
between these two meanings. That our notion of space is 
called into activity by the external world cannot be doubt- 



174 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

ed, but like genius it must be in us before it ever could 
come out. The same may be said of language. Even an 
unlimited series of external impressions could never have 
brought the language of the human race into existence, 
unless we had already been endowed with the faculty for 
it. A scientific investigation in either case would have 
little value, since we are too remote from the period in 
which we acquire our first perceptions of space and time to 
obtain acciu-ate data concerning them. We can only 
reason about them, as we reason concerning the constitu- 
tion of the sun and the planets. This much, however, is 
certain, that the infant child becomes conscious of space 
as soon as he opens his eyes, just as he becomes conscious 
of an external world by the sense of touch. The knowledge 
is immediate and continuous, for doubt is an intellectual 
process which can only arise at a later stage of his growth. 
In order to doubt we must have experience of error. It 
certainly seems as if a child must realize separation at the 
first sight, and even if the object before him is but a few 
feet away he must be conscious that it does not touch 
him, as those things do which he feels with his hands and 
body. At all events he learns this very quickly, and does 
not require repeated experiments, like a natural philoso- 
pher, to become convinced of it. 

This visual angle is what we customarily mean when we 
speak of space. If we go into a dark room where our 
eyesight no longer avails and we are obliged to feel our 
way, we still have the recollection of space to prevent our 
losing the sense of it; and not alone that, but the fact that 
only our hands and feet are in contact with external 
objects — for we do not feel the atmosphere — shows us 
that there must be space around us, without the assistance 
of eyesight. Indeed, the sense of space, having once 
originated, never can leave the human mind unless we 



SPACE AND TIME 175 

are being drowned, or smothered in some other manner 
when we return to the antecedent condition of the child 
before his eyes are opened, and the two different meanings 
in which space is accepted become reconciled.* It is 
probable that persons born blind also acquire a sense of 
space through unimpeded motion. 

Space can only exist by division into spaces, and these 
divisions are of human invention. Infinite space would 
be simply nothing. It is impossible to conceive that space 
has a limit or that it is without a limit; for as it exists only 
in thought its limitations can only be those which are 
imposed by the individual at any particular time. What 
there may be beyond the range of human observation in the 
external world we cannot know, and it is quite useless to 
speculate. An infinity of thought is one thing, but an 
infinity of matter is another, and the human mind shrinks 
from the contemplation of it. 

Space might be described as an imaginary sphere with 
an infinite radius; but this infinity is subjective and not 
objective. An objective infinity would in this case result 
in the subordination of mind to matter and the extinction 
of organic life. Dr. C. C. Everett says: "Space is simply 
the possibility of infinite extension, or, what is the same 
thing, the infinite possibility of extension. Space is in 
itself nothing. If you imagine an object struck out of 
existence, and nothing to take its place, that nothing 
would be called space. f" Space as an objective reality 
would be a materialized chimaera. 

*De Qulncey's testimony in regard to space and time imder abnormal 
conditions, is worth nothing, for he is hardly a trustworthy witness. 
His description of a night under the influence of opium, in which he 
seemed to live seventy years, and beheld a sea of human faces, is a pla- 
giarism, perhaps unconscious, from Shakespeare's Richard III., where 
it will be found in the prison scene of Clarence. 

fEverett's Science of Thought. 



176 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

WHAT IS TIME? 

As space has been defined as infinite extension, so time 
may be termed infinite intension. It is the form of 
measurement which we adopt for our internal fife. Space 
is not an objective reahty, but it has an objective appHca- 
tion, whereas the application of time is originally subjec- 
tive. I do not think, however, that the sense of time re- 
sults from the sequence of our intellectual operations, but 
rather from the repetition of the same idea or necessary 
consideration.* So long as man lives in a purely animal 
condition, one day is like another, and there is no occasion 
for counting them; but as soon as he seeks to improve his 
mode of life, the necessity of time arises so that he may 
regulate his life by it. The sun and moon do not mark 
time for us, but we make use of them as measures of time. 
Th^t this is the case ip evident from the fact that we cor- 
rect the slight aberrations of the sun and moon, in order 
to obtain mathematically perfect divisions of time. There 
is always this close relation between the subjective and 
the objective in practical affairs, for man is continually 
obliged to adapt his life to external changes over which he 
has no control; and it is this which has so often deceived 
philosophers in regard to the true source of his mental 
cognitions; but it should be remembered that if the long 
periods of time are derived from the revolutions of the 
earth, its smaller divisions into hours, minutes, and 
seconds are purely arbitrary. 

It is a popular mistake to suppose that time extends to 
eternity. If time were to cease, eternity would begin; 
but in such case time would be limited, would not extend 
to infinity. Eternity is really the antipodes of time, or 
as John Weiss said, " Eternity is now, " — a perpetual now. 

*As, for instance, the necessity of obtaining food at regular intervab. 



SPACE AND TIME 177 

Time may therefore be described by an imaginary line 
extending from the eternal to the infinite. 

The first cognition of a new-born child is that of life 
which comes with his first scream. The next is objectivity 
— what Professor James calls "otherness." The child's 
third cognition must be that of objective self, derived from 
the sense of hmiger; and its fourth that of space, from 
sight or the free movements of its limbs; and its sense of 
time is probably derived from the repeated sensations of 
hunger. These experiences are, however, purely subjec- 
tive. 

Time and space are brought into relation with one anoth- 
er through motion. Of space considered in the abstract, 
there can be no motion, but motion produces a sense of 
distance which is one of the attributes of space, and lapse 
of time produces a sense of motion. It is thus that dis- 
tances, miscalled spaces, serve to represent the lapse of 
time on a clock; but even the face of a clock could not 
properly be called a space, for, as before stated, space 
extends in every direction . By no effort of the ima gination 
can space be reduced to a single line, straight or curved, 
and therefore all attempts to convert time into space will 
invariably end in a confusion of language. Intension 
cannot be converted into extension. We speak of a day's 
journey to indicate the time we have spent in travelling, 
but the earth's surface is never measured in that manner. 
So also in Switzerland, travelling is estimated by hours, 
because the country is so uneven that a statement in miles 
would aflford no adequate impression of the journey. 
Time is measured by distances, but no railroad train is 
sufficiently accurate to measure distance by time. Only 
the revolutions of the earth and planets — ^no human 
invention — can be made to serve that purpose. 

It is impossible to conceive of time as extending like 



178 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

space in every direction. It extends backward to infinity 
and forward to infinity, — or rather from the inconceivable 
to the inconceivable. It might be symbolized by a straight 
line with ^ at either end. This is a grand idea, for it affords 
an intimation of a higher intelligence than we mortals 
possess, to which such a fact can be plainly perceptible. 

As Kmio Fischer observes, the whole science of mathe- 
matics is founded on space and time.* Space gives us 
addition and subtraction; time, multiplication and divi- 
sion. Multiplication results from the repetition of the 
same spatial quantity, and, as has already been stated, 
it is this repetition of a mental cognition which gives us 
the sense of time. If the spaces are unequal, time 
cannot affect them except by obtaining a new form of 
measurement. Multiplication equals time plus addition. 
Now a pure mathematics is an a priori science, an 
emanation of the intellect which has no objective reality. 
Numbers are abstract types. 

There are no grand ideas in Herbert Spencer's psychol- 
ogy; as there never can be in a materialistic philosophy. 
It is true that he realizes that the quality of space and time 
has some peculiarity which it is not easy to explain on the 
principles he has adopted. He says (page 25): "Excep- 
tion may be taken to this argument on several groimds — 
on the ground that space and time, taken in the abstract, 
are not strictly conceivable things in the sense that other 
things are. " Here he evidently has obtained an intima- 
tion of the truth, but he closes his mind to it in order to 
hold fast to his preconceived opinions of mental evolution. 
Time and space are subjective realities, or they could not 
be conceived in the abstract. It is impossible to conceive 
the sun, a tree, a lion, or any other purely objective reality 
in the abstract. A man may be considered in the abstract 
*Fischer on Kant's Kritik, p.49. 



SPACE AND TIME 179 

in his subjective intellectual capacity, but not in his 
objective animal capacity. A lion, also, may be treated 
abstractly in art, for art always contains the subjective 
element; and, moreover, art and metaphysics are two 
very different subjects. Everything created by man, if 
it be only a rude boundary mark, contains this union of 
the subjective and objective, which distinguishes it in 
kind from the purely natural. Man is at once his own 
object and subject. "The great first cause" might be 
defined as infinite subjectivity. 

The English and Scotch schools of philosophy have 
long been in opposition in regard to the reality of the ex- 
ternal world. This time-honored discussion may have 
borne its fruit in the German philosphy of reconciliation, 
but it has always seemed to me a needless form of inquiry. 
What difference does it make, so long as we are obliged 
to deal with the external world as a reality, whether in 
itself it is real or imaginary? The true question ought to 
be, What do we know of matter, and what do we know 
of mind, as distinguished from it? In Plato's time more 
was probably known about mind than matter, but Aris- 
totle soon after gave a powerful impetus to the investiga- 
tion of physical causes. The truth would seem to be 
that in the beginning men knew nothing of either, but 
that we are gradually finding out the quality and attributes 
of both. All the physical sciences are exemplifications of 
matter, and help to instruct us what it is in itself. Much 
has been accomplished in this direction, and much still 
remains to be done. In like manner the whole science 
of mathematics, as well as metaphysics and ethics, are 
illustrative of mind, and instruct us concerning its true 
nature. We might even assert that he who is not capable 
of perceiving that mind is a reality as much as the ground 
under his feet, is not fitted for the study of metaphysics. 



180 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

The philosopher who stated that mind and matter are 
separated by the whole diameter of being, was right in 
one sense, but does not seem to have realized that they 
are perpetually in contact, and often so closely united that 
many well educated persons are unable to think of them 
separately. 

The novelty of Spencer's philosophy is his introduction 
of Darwinian evolution as an explanation of the growth 
and development of intellectual life. This has its value, 
and there are portions of his work on psychology which 
no living writer on the subject can afford to disregard; 
but his attempt in this direction also fails of complete- 
ness because he passes over the origin of consciousness. 
That marks a barrier between man and the brute, which 
no scheme of physical evolution can explain; for physical 
evolution is not in any manner required for it. The Dar- 
winian theory serves very well as a physical explanation 
of the origin of mankind, but it makes his intellectual 
development all the more difficult to understand. The 
origin of consciousness probably coincided with the origin 
of language, for one necessitates the other; and if the 
intellectual development of the lower animals coincided 
with their physical development, we should expect to 
find more highly developed faculties in the family of apes 
than among dogs and elephants; but the reverse of this 
would seem to be the case. Would we not also be justified 
in expecting a higher degree of rudimentary language 
among apes than other classes of animals? No evidence 
has been discovered, however, to prove that there is any 
further communication between apes than between a hen 
and her chickens. The cries of animals are all interjec- 
tions, and we have obtained no testimony as yet to show 
that any animal makes use of a definite sound with 
reference to a particular object; which, after all, is what 



SPACE AND TIME 181 

constitutes language. This is the weak side of the Dar- 
winian theory, and its advocates in England and America 
try to avoid it as much as possible. Even if the Darwin- 
ians succeed in bridging this chasm at a future time, the 
transition from inorganic to organic matter will still 
remain to be explained. If we even suppose that the 
tendency to language and seK-consciousness was involved 
in the nerve-cells of the very lowest organism, by what 
means or power did those nerve-cells originally come to 
exist? This we do not know, nor is it likely that we shall 
ever discover it, so long as we are mortal men, but it is a 
metaphysical fact of the highest importance that no 
student of philosophy can safely disregard. The most 
elaborate schemes, the most ingenious system of thought, 
will ultimately come to nothing, unless this element be 
included. The mathematician is constantly obliged to 
deal with the infinite and the indeterminate, although he 
can have but a faint conception of the significance of 
either. So, likewise, the philosopher is obliged to deal 
with existence in its twofold form, animate and inanimate 
and make use of both as factors in his reasoning, although 
they still remain to him incomprehensible. They are 
difficult factors to deal with, and make the subject more 
difficult to understand, but it will not do to shun them or 
evade the conclusions which they force upon us. 



PRAGMATISM 

THE eighteenth century was an age of skepticism 
in France, and of a struggle between skepticism 
and reahsm in England, while Germany evolved 
a strong faith in the ideal, which crossed the 
Atlantic under the name of transcendentalism. The 
nineteenth century, however, is chiefly distinguished in 
metaphysics by its materialistic schools, of which there 
has been a regular succession, each bearing a definite 
relation to the time in which it flourished. The first was 
that of Auguste Comte, who argued that we possessed no 
true knowledge except what is derived through the senses. 
It might be termed skepticism based on materialism. The 
next was the utilitarian school of John Stuart Mill, which 
corresponded with the great mechanical expansion of that 
time. After him came Herbert Spencer, who introduced 
the theory of Darwinian evolution into metaphysics; and 
since his time there have been materialistic philosophers 
of every description; but the latest sensation of this kind 
is the "pragmatism" of Professor William James, which 
might be described succinctly as materialism based on 
skepticism. 

In order to understand a writer to the core, we have to 
know his antecedents. Professor James began life as a 
physician and served for a time in a lunatic asylum, but 
he did not like the practice of his profession, and he had no 
faith in the efficacy of medicine. As in all skeptical 
natures, he continually shifted from one opinion to another. 

182 



PRAGMATISM 183 

He obtained the position of instructor of comparative 
anatomy at Harvard, in which he developed an excellent 
talent for lecturing. From this he rose to be assistant 
professor of English metaphysics, and about the same time 
he became the intimate friend of the late E. L. Godkin, 
whom Senator Lodge, who knew him well, describes as a. 
materialist pure and simple. The union of skepticism 
and materialism in Professor James thus came about 
naturally enough, and pragmatism is the final outcome 
thereof. 

I suppose that "pragmatism," in plain English, means 
practicality. I do not find that Professor James makes 
the sense in which he uses it perfectly clear to the general 
reader. The word is derived from the Greek word " prang- 
ma, " which our author translates incorrectly as "action" 
— an abstract idea; and yet he defines pragmatism as 
"the attitude of looking away from first principles, cate- 
gories, supposed necessities, and of looking toward last 
things, consequences and facts," that is, looking away 
from the abstract to the concrete, or in other words, 
from the pragmatic to pragmatism. Is pragmatism right 
and the pragmatic wrong; or is one more right than the 
other? If the pragmatic is not a first principle, what 
kind of a principle is it.? Here we have a deep-seated 
contradiction at the outset. "Practicality" results ua the 
impracticable. 

Nothing could be more impracticable than such a dogma 
— for it is a dogma, although modified by the name of 
mental attitude. We are told to look away from principles 
to results; but a carpenter cannot build a fence without 
having the principles in his mind on which a fence should 
be constructed. A man cannot succeed in any kind of 
business unless he acts according to certain rules which 
serve as the principles of that business; and so it is from 



184 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

the lowest to the highest — ^f rom the commonest affairs to 
law, philosophy, and religion. The principles of mercan- 
tile business are not the first principles truly, but there 
must be first principles somewhere. The higher intellec- 
tual life of man is a perpetual striving for them : — 

"So thou hast immortality in mind; 

Hast grounds which will not let thee doubt it? 
The best of groimd in this I find. 

That man could never do without it." 

Religious principles are like sheet anchors, which man 
throws out in the storm and stress of life to save him from 
drifting into the limitless ocean of disbelief, where no safe 
harbor awaits him, but only the deadly rocks of despond- 
ency and total discouragement. This is nothing new that 
I am saying; but it is better to tell old truths than to invent 
new subtleties. 

Professor James' treatment of this all-important subject 
is the cardinal pivot of his philosophy; and what we notice 
primarily is his lack of reverence, of veneration. Goethe 
says, the thrill of awe is the best endowment of human 
nature; but James does not appear to share in this. I do 
not find the word immortality in the index of his book — 
that belonged to the ages of superstition; but he says, 
page 121: "Other than this practical significance, that 
is, as giving us pragmatic results, the words, God, free-will, 
design, etc., have no significance." Such expressions as 
the One, the infinitely perfect, the immutable, omniscient, 
eternal, have no instructive definition for us. Unless 
taken pragmatically, "they are a pompous robe of adjec- 
tives. " Taken pragmatically, however, that is, for what 
Mr. James calls "their cash value," they serve us off and 
on to light up the darkness here "in the thicket of life." 



PRAGMATISM 185 

And in another place, "Religious ideas are true, so far as 
they are helpful and improving to us ; " but it is to be feared 
that after such a disillusioning as this they will not remain 
helpful very long. Professor James' theology is like the 
course of the Flying Dutchman, which returns every night 
over the same distance which it sailed the preceding day. 
Skepticism serves sometimes an excellent purpose as a 
disintegrating element, but it never makes any real 
progress. 

I suppose Prof. James would complain of me, as W. D. 
Whitney did of Max Miiller, for an unfair use of "garbled 
extracts," but I honestly believe that I have made his 
meaning as clear as he has himself. His Browning-like 
partiality for recondite figures of speech makes him a diffi- 
cult writer to follow. In this respect he does not resemble 
Mill and Spencer, who use very clear, simple English. 

Froude said that there never has been any atheism like 
Roman atheism : but I think there has, and it is the English 
atheism of the present day, — the atheism of the English 
rector who told Rev. Mr. Vickers that he was not paid 
for believing the gospel, but for preaching it. I should 
be loth to class Mr. James, who is a generous, large-hearted 
man, in such a list, but he represents them more nearly 
than any other American writer does. In 1872 Prof. 
Tyndall, who was an Emersonian, came to Boston, and 
was invited to deliver a course of lectures at the Lowell 
Institute. He asked Judge Lowell if Emerson had ever 
lectured there, and Lowell replied with a decided negative; 
but the doors of the institute are thrown open to William 
James, who is much more ultra than Emerson, and 
fashionable people go there to hear him. Whether they 
understand what he really means is another question. 
He is not a metaphysician, but an anti-metaphysician. 
"Pragmatism" is dedicated to the memory of John Stuart 



186 POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS 

Mill, but it is doubtful if Mill, who was of a sincerely 
religious nature and by no means a pure materialist, 
would have approved of it. 

An inevitable corollary on pragmatism is that this earth 
has already seen its best days, the age of the megatherium 
and the dinornis gigantea. Since then, animal and vege- 
table life has visibly declined, and nature evidently made a 
mistake when she created man. 

"Erect as a sunbeam 

Upspringeth the palm, 
The elephant browses 
Undaunted and calm. " 

The elephant is a noble, sagacious, and harmless animal. 
He believes in perfect social equality. He does not make 
war or torture his fellow creatures. In these respects, as 
well as in material bulk, the elephant surpasses man; 
"but," says Elihu in Job, "there is a spirit in man; and 
the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understand- 
ing. " This is what St. Paul meant by the birth from 
above (the spiritual birth) of man; and also what Descartes 
meant by his "I am, because I think." Professor James 
would not seem to have gone through this experience ; but 
I believe his book will do good in an indirect way, by show- 
ing that materialism taken by itself must lead to atheism 
and nothing less. Professor James says that matter is 
infinitely refined. And so it is, in certain cases, but in 
others it is infinitely nasty. 

Emerson was an idealist with his feet on firm ground. 
James was a realist drifting in the clouds. 



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